Designing information savvy societies: an introduction to assessability

Abstract

This paper provides first steps toward an empirically grounded design vocabulary for assessable design as an HCI response to the global need for better information literacy skills. We present a framework for synthesizing literatures called the Interdisciplinary Literacy Framework and use it to highlight gaps in our understanding of information literacy that HCI as a field is particularly well suited to fill. We report on two studies that lay a foundation for developing guidelines for assessable information system design. The first is a study of Wikipedians', librarians', and laypersons' information assessment practices from which we derive two important features of assessable designs: information provenance and stewardship. The second is an experimental study in which we operationalize these concepts in designs and test them using Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk).