Position statement – Ann Light

Ann Light

(annl@cogs.susx.ac.uk)

COGS, University of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9QH

The semiotics of website interaction

I am working with producers and users of interactive websites to learn more about the design of interactive components. To this end, I am employing a semiotic analysis of the elements involved, particularly with a view to understanding what the user perceives.

When users interact with websites they can do so in a number of ways: they make meaning from the text on the pages, from the presence of interactive components displayed as part of the site; indeed, they make meaning from the fact that the site exists. While a great deal of work has examined the way in which the content of media is interpreted (for instance, the work of Hall, van Dijk), there has been little research into how the layout and context of interactive components affects their communicative power. But, clearly, the presence of these components has a symbolic dimension, just as the presence of words and pictures do.

At the other end of the process, in producing the site, considerable selection and interpretation also takes place. In particular, when considering websites with the potential for interaction, developers have to make sense not only of the development process in the abstract, but of the relationships they wish to cultivate and of the options available to them to address users. This design process is more complicated than ordinary software development because the developer may or may not have a dual role as both designer of the system and also representative of the company producing the site. The producer of the site has an ongoing relationship with visitors to the site that is not typical in software production. The relationship of developer and user, then, must stand in during the design process for the longer term relationship embedded in the components of the site.

My work, in interviewing producers and users about the significance of the site’s functions and how these are displayed, or communicated, is to attempt to understand what local meanings are being created and what contributes to the formation of these meanings.

This is a new field of enquiry. But, if we include the use of linguistic metaphor in analysis then there is a short history of this kind of exploration on which to build. Concepts drawn from verbal communication have been used metaphorically to explain interactivity before, but these have been, by and large, used to describe the interaction between user and machine and have most often involved structures taken from conversation analysis, for instance Payne (1991). Now we are seeing a grammar of interactivity for the material on the screen. Bonime and Pohlmann (1998) compare the grammar of cinematic assembly with the writer’s grammar of icons, menus and buttons in their description of writing for new media. They talk in terms of inouns and iverbs. This is the beginning of an exploration of how ‘online’ interactive symbols can be construed, developing the use of syntactic description further into non-textual fields. However, it does not explore the double role of the symbol, both as solicitation and as graphical form, and it does not deal with contextual factors.

Developments in design for interaction include IBM's work, where a logical mark-up language for interactive components is being specified as an extension to XML. Here particular interactive functions are described semantically for incorporation in a range of networked applications, from palmtop and mobile phone to Web browsers (AUIML 2000). This work isolates the function of solicitation from that of presentation, but obviously the function must be embedded in some way. IBM is using user-centred design guidelines to inform how a particular function is rendered for a particular application.

Clearly, it is insufficient to understand semantics without syntax, or vice versa. A thorough inquiry into meaning must deal with the significance of the component’s:

presence – the invitation to interact;
design – the form of the form, so to speak;
placing – where it sits and how it is surrounded;
exploitation – is there evidence of material that has been contributed through the component by other users, acting as an example on the site? (What one might call an implicit invitation to interact.)

There is considerable work to be done in this area, work that few are yet tackling. However, social semiotics, drawing especially upon Peircean semiotics of object, sign and interpretant (see for instance Jensen 1995), offers a structure for this kind of work and it underpins the theoretical aspects of my research into the interfaces between producers and users of websites.

My analysis of these issues is still to be developed, but even in asking the questions, a new area of thinking opens.

Relevant publications include:

Light, A. and Wakeman, I., in press, ‘Beyond the Interface: Users’ Perceptions of Interaction and Audience on Websites’ to appear in 1^st special issue of Interacting with Computers on ‘Interfaces for the Active Web’.

Light, A., ‘The influence of context on users’ responses to websites’, to appear in the proceedings of the international conference on Information Seeking in Context, Goteburg, Sweden, August 2000.

Light, A. and Rogers, Y., 1999, ‘Conversation as Publishing: the Role of News Forums on the Web’ in special issue of Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication on ‘Persistent Conversation’, 4, 4,1999.

Ann Light is part of the Human Centred Technology Group at COGS. She is completing a socio-cultural analysis of the interaction between website producers and their users for a Doctorate in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. She has practical experience of working with commercial leisure and business developers and of exploring the impact of the online environment on software design; she is also among the pioneers of academic Web consumer research. Before moving into research and consultancy, she was in charge of editorial and electronic publishing training for Reed Elsevier’s business publishing group. She has collaborated on two EPSRC projects: Lowband, exploring user-controlled open architectures for networked computing; and Emmanate, looking at users’ conceptual models of the internet.