We've recently sent out a questionnaire to artists who produce digital interactive artworks (including anything from websites to installations.) titled "The Art Audience as Users". It is part of a research that looks at:
1. how artists, who make interactive artworks, anticipate and gather
feedback about the nature of their audiences' interactions with the work;
2. their range of opinions towards user centered design.

I'm not sure for rhizome but there has been at least one heated discussion on nettime.org about usability (Disassociate Webdesign from Usability, January 2001). Meanwhile it seems that applied arts have accepted the arguments of Nielson, Norman and others. But what about artists working with interactive arts. How do they deal with usability issues? Should they care?

We've already got some very interesting feedback that shows that interactive artists do take into account issues of usability, response, ergonomics… (Maybe that's not astonishing at all?) Interestingly enough many artists do seem very comfortable with the concept of the art audience as users, even though the term "user" itself is heavily criticised among applied arts. Even user testing in some form seems to be quite common in interactive art. We would like to get a broader view on how the art community thinks about these issues beyond the questionnaire. So feel free to join into the discussion here.

Below you will find the abstract of our paper that we will submit to the Pixelraider (http://pixelraiders.org) conference next year as part of our research.

ABSTRACT:

In recent years there has been a lot of discussion about the "usability"
of software and digitally augmented devices. Since Donald Norman in his 1990
book 'The Design of Everyday Things