What does usability test?

Usability, for the purposes of my research interests, measures the functionality of software or a website for people to achieve the purposes for which it was intended and created. Usability tests how graphics and text interact on the image of the page; it tests whether the right words attach to the correct kind of link; it measures how effective specific text is.

Usability testing is not, however, interested in meta-information. I very deliberately choose to call this "meta-information" because I'm approaching the original idea of "meta," and I want to separate "metadata" and all its connotations from this, for right now. Meta-narrative, for instance, is the narrative outside a text that elucidates the text. Metaphysics deals with transcendence from science.

Meta-DATA deals with the outside data, that yes, is descriptive to a website, but that is also representative of a website as a whole; meta-DATA is "beyond" the site; meta-DATA is NOT the site; and in fact, META-data is that which pulls users into a site, though they never actually SEE the means by which they are pulled (metadata).

I've talked to a lot of metadata librarians who keep telling me--whom I wouldn't blame of they get slightly annoyed at my questioning--"Metadata is just a tool." (And I say this fondly because I feel friendship and gratitude for all my metadata librarian friends. I've had such fascinating conversations with them, and their patience is something for which I also have undying gratitude.)

While I agree, metadata is a tool, I also agree that my car is only a tool, a means by which I drove from Lubbock to Austin this past week. As I drove, I stopped and took photographs of windmills between Fluvana and Sweetwater; I pulled off to look at cemeteries when they were marked; after arriving in Austin, I ventured out to Barton Springs one evening and sat on a boulder to watch the rain as it fell in the water.

Let's look at the verbs that the tool, my car, allowed me to use here: "to drive" (in a car), "to stop" (in a car); "to pull off," "to arrive," "to venture." That car is one heck of a tool. Albeit, it is a tool, but it is the tool by which I was able to explore a lot.

I assert that metadata is similarly powerful. Perhaps metadata is only a tool, but I argue that it is the highway by which we access information.* If usability tests structure, functionality, layout, even information architecture of a website, should it not also test usability of the meta-information attached to a website?** Also, while libraries and archives, in digitization, recognize that metadata is important and useful, industry has not started to recognize this--and I do wonder if units of digitization actually do usability testing on the metadata itself. I've heard of libraries running usability tests on their website, but I have only heard of libraries putting together focus groups for search engine ranking improvement--rather than use testing of metadata itself. Even more, metadata is also a set of decisions created by a specific person or persons to limn how the website should be located by/present itself users. It's a powerful and deliberate decision set that brings a person from Chechnya to a website in Texas--perhaps just a tool, but a strong tool nonetheless.

(I had a long talk today with Dr. Still, my dissertation director, and this was what we went over.)

*(Do not mix my car metaphor with the highway metaphor. It's a dangerous thing to get caught in Ana's metaphor land.)

**Writing an article on this right now. Hope to send it out for publication soon.