Introducing rhetoric into usability: applying burke's pentad

This paper supports recent calls for acknowledging rhetoric's relationship to the usability field and for the role that technical communicators can play in creating knowledge via a "long and wide view of usability." An expanded view of usability-as an art supported by scientific research-recognizes how technical communicators work in tandem with engineers to connect science and culture [1, 320; 328]. More specifically, the authors argue for using Kenneth Burke's concept of the dramatistic pentad as an analytical tool for seeing and understanding a usability situation from multiple and alternate viewpoints. We propose the pentad as a way of approaching how we theorize and conceptualize usability. Through the lens of the pentad (act, agent, agency, scene, purpose) we conceptualize a usability test as the agency through which agents (actors) act or behave. This leads to exploration of one of the pentadic "ratios:" agent-agency.