An Integrated Communications Approach to User Multimedia Interactions: Broadening Usability Evaluations from a Communication Perspective

The usual measure of the effectiveness of interactive operations on multimedia texts and related tools is usability. However, usability evaluations cannot tell us how users make meanings about the text/tools and why they construct such meanings, especially if the users have different social backgrounds. This book, therefore, provides the application of an integrated approach within a communications perspective, comprising visual social semiotics, social construction of computer use, and communicative acts, applied to a case study of multimedia courseware interactions by students at a higher education institution in Indonesia. Although each of the three components of this integrated approach draws attention to a different focus of analysis, the investigation shows that the integrated approach is a valuable tool to examine ways in which users construct meaning from the text, and to investigate different meaning-making processes. The integrated approach employed contributes to communication and media studies. The study also provides researchers and anyone concerned with communication studies with a much richer analytical and developmental tool than is provided by usability per se.