| Popis: |
University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology. Literature has indicated that representation of women in media has shown little change over a period of decades. These representations, where present, are often stereotypical and provide limiting views of the range of lived experiences of women. Queer women in particular are significantly underrepresented in media, online and in the broader literature. Furthermore, where studies of women and queer women’s representation is undertaken, content analysis is the key methodology, which can reduce queer women to specific singular-dimensional roles and metrics. Individuals on the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex and Queer (LGBTIQ) spectrum often find themselves considered as one group, when in fact they are separate populations, further contributing to invisibility of specific queer groups. In the online context, user experience design focuses on mainstream target users, leaving little room for ‘edge cases’ such as queer women. Furthermore, practices in the technological industry result in product design defaults that exclude queer women. Despite a shift from human-computer interactions to user-centred design, the majority of UX design processes remain reductionist, focusing on a user completing a task, as opposed to a user’s lived experience. Though also recognised as an important tool in the design process to capture lived experience, there is limited literature discussing the scope of participatory design in the queer user context. Therefore, this research is important as it extends the concept of lived experience into studies of media and queer representation and looks at lived experience across the breadth of being a queer woman, in a multi-faceted manner. It takes into account not only specific events in a queer woman’s life, but the day-to-day engagement with broader society through media and technology. Study participants were provided a number of mainstream websites and asked to conduct a photo narrative and participate in an interview regarding their representation and emotional responses towards the design and content they were consuming. A thematic analysis was conducted against participant responses, and emergent themes identified in the structure of global, organising and basic themes. Sentiment analysis was then applied to participants’ emotional responses and thematic responses to identify the sentiment at which the themes emerged. Specific thematic sentiment was correlated with the original websites examined by participants to provide a metric for measuring the sentiment of queer women’s experience of particular websites. The results indicated that queer women are not well served by mainstream websites. Websites that did not appropriately or adequately represent queer women, those that provided content that was not relevant, and those that were considered exclusionary due to the reproduction or embodiment of heteronormative cultural norms resulted in low sentiment scores. Those websites that contributed to queer women’s invisibility through use of stereotypes and assumptions of heterosexuality additionally contributed to negative sentiment. From the participant data and themes, a user experience design framework to design appropriate experiences for queer women was proposed, taking into account the key emergent themes of ‘representation’, ‘relevance’, and ‘inclusion’, and underpinned by user sentiment. The thesis concludes with recommendations for implementation and use of the framework, discussion of its limitations and suggestions for future work. |
