Kairos as a Heuristic to Analyze Context of Use

Usability studies are an important part of our curriculum in professional writing and communication, contributing to methods for analyzing audience. But I have often found in teaching usability a reduction of our rhetorical purpose to studies focused on navigation. Although navigation is extremely important, I argue for the need to also analyze the contextual factors that shape how people approach and interpret the discourse. In this essay, I outline a unit on heuristic evaluation based on Kairos, an ancient rhetorical concept that can help students assess perspective and circumstance before they design user tests.