Investigating communicative features of user interfaces

The concept of usability has evolved in different research communities and the focus of research has varied. During the last couple of years, research has been oriented towards acknowledging more appropriately the social context of IT system use. The purpose of this paper is to investigate further the usefulness of a communicative perspective on user interfaces, as a means to understand the IT artefact as part of social and organizational con-text. Such a perspective seems to be important to promote designs that are both use-able and act-able.