Our May 2023 essay is “We Need to Talk About How We Talk About Accessibility” by Sarah Horton and Erin Lauridsen. Consistent with recent concerns in the UX community about how word choice can have unintentional negative effects on marginalized populations, they present examples of how this can be problematic and strategies for providing better support for accessibility and disability inclusion.
In addition to the essay, this issue includes two research papers: One is on the think-aloud methodology, and the other is a literature review of UX in e-government services.
The first article is “Talking About Thinking Aloud: Perspectives from Interactive Think-Aloud Practitioners,” by Liam O’Brien and Stephanie Wilson. Despite its well-known problems with reliability (such as the evaluator effect), interactive think-aloud is a very popular usability testing method. Analysis of interviews with practitioners revealed some novel practices and attitudes that support a broader view of validity in usability evaluation.
The second article is “UX in E-government Services for Citizens: A Systematic Literature Review,” by Asma Aldrees and Denis Gračanin. More and more, government services are available online with all the usual benefits (such as 24/7 access, no waiting in line, and no making and keeping appointments). In this paper, the authors selected 75 state-of-the-art studies from an initial set of 672 published between 2000 and 2022. They reviewed them to identify six major user experience concerns with e-government services, and they end with recommendations on enhancing the quality of citizens’ interactions with these services.
