Building on the work of technical communication scholars concerned with social justice and electoral politics, this article examines the Coray for Congress (1994) campaign as a case study to argue in support of a more formal disciplinary commitment to political technical communication (PxTC). Specifically, I closely analyze the ideographic communication design of pre-digital PxTC artifacts from the campaign archive. The type of pre-digital political communication design products analyzed in this article are ubiquitous even today. The implications of four dominant ideographs are analyzed in this case study: <jobs>, <communities>, <families>, and <"see PDF">. Key takeaways for PxTC practitioners, educators, and scholars are discussed.

Getto, Labriola, and Ruszkiewicz's edited collection, Content Strategy in Technical Communication , is an important addition to the field of technical communication, and important as one of the only collections to address best practices in content strategy while also connecting those ideas to pedagogies for teaching. In focusing specifically on content strategy, Getto, Labriola, and Ruszkiewicz note that "content strategists often work within a wide variety of organizations and must respond to an even broader array of situations, challenges, and audience needs" (p. 7). To meet this large array of needs, the chapters in the book argue that pedagogies must integrate content strategy ideas to support student exploration of content strategy work. Connecting content strategy theories and best practices with pedagogies will support more theory development on content strategy, and will provide a better sense of classroom best practices that help learners assess the effectiveness of content, regularly. To accomplish this, the editors divide the book into two parts: Content Strategy Best Practices (chapters 2 through 6) and Content Strategy Pedagogies (chapters 7 through 10).

In Wicked, Incomplete, and Uncertain , Jason Swarts examines the changing role of technical communication in addressing user problems that are becoming more specialized and situated within use cases that users themselves do not readily understand. These emergent and real-time problems have led to the rise of online forums and communities, which this books studies in depth. In particular, Swarts studies four community forums for software technology products---Microsoft Excel, Adobe InDesign, Gimp, and Mozilla Thunderbird---that are not only commonly used by technical writers, but also popular products with numerous plug-ins and end users across industries. As a technical writer myself, I have used all of these products, and participate in forums for open source and cloud computing products at the enterprise software company that I work at (IBM). This review seeks to synopsize Swarts's book by reflecting upon how I have or have not used such techniques in my own workplace experience.

Technical communication and user experience studies traditionally uphold Western onto-epistemological distinctions between technical users and objects. Recent calls for the inclusion of cultural approaches to technical communication, however, have asked scholars to consider the influence cultural knowledge has on communication design. This article takes up these calls by reading technical documentation through new materialist and Indigenous ways of knowing. Using a prominent Jewish cemetery in Gainesville, Florida as a case study, this article treats technical artifacts and subjects as co-constitutive, arguing for the cultural and material agency of technical documentation design in mediating and shaping user experience.

This paper introduces the concept of transactional design---integrating Druschke's "transactional" model of rhetoric and science and Kinsella's model of "public expertise"---to demonstrate how technical communication and user experience (UX) designers and researchers can play an essential role in helping scientists cultivate meaningful relationships with members of the public toward the goal of making scientific content more accessible and actionable. This paper reports on the challenges that arose when a water modeling system built for experts was adapted for a public museum audience. It discusses specific issues the UX team had in contending with outdated "deficit" and "conduit" models of communication when working with scientists to adapt the system; it provides a checklist for steps that technical communication and UX designers and researchers---as those who best understand audiences and work directly with users---can champion the idea of transactional design to setup knowledge-making partnerships toward the co-construction of public-facing scientific communication projects.

Bayes's theorem allows us to use subjective thinking to find numerical values to formulate assessments of risk. It is more than a mathematical formula; it can be thought of as an iterative process that challenges us to imagine the potential for "unknown, unknowns." The heuristics involved in this process can be enhanced if they take into consideration some of the established risk assessment and communication models used today in technical communication that are concerned with the social construction of meaning and the kairos involved in rhetorical situations. Understanding the connection between Bayesian analysis and risk communication will allow us to better convey the potential for risk that is based on probabilistic assumptions.

With growing attention to "intelligent content" and "dynamic delivery" in the advent of connected technologies (i.e., Internet of Things, artificial intelligence agents), component content management and structured authoring skills are becoming increasingly required of technical communicators today. To produce reusable intelligent content, technical communicators need a systematic workflow and common authoring standard. Our experience in industry and in educating technical communicators has led us to seek out resources for understanding existing standards and practicing them with technical communication students. As such, both authors have used the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) markup standard and experienced what may be a perplexing process in content creation and management. Carlos Evia's book, Creating Intelligent Content with Lightweight DITA , caught our attention as the title suggests an accessible way into learning and applying what has become a widely adopted standard for structured authoring. Understanding that Lightweight DITA (LwDITA) does not aim to replace existing DITA standards, we approach this review not with an intention to examine its viability, but rather a focus on the rhetorical work in structured content authoring and its continuous evolution.

Professional writers adapt their skills to suit expanded professional roles that involve production and management of information, but preparation through mere skill-based training is problematic because that communication work is messy in ways that are not addressable through simple skills training. We must understand how skills "influence and shape the discursive activities surrounding their use" (Selber, 1994). This paper reports the results of a study of people trained in humanities disciplines like communication, English, writing studies, technical communication, etc., on how they have found means to employ their training in their workplace and keep what is humanistic about writing and communicating at the foreground of their interactions with information technologies. Instead of focusing on technology alone, this research encourages a unified approach to preparing students for the workplace.

I still remember the feeling. I was beginning the 2nd year of my PhD program and was finally feeling like I had an understanding of what being a technical communication scholar means. I was also starting to feel critical of our field---wondering if I, an Indigenous scholar from rural Alaska, would find a meaningful place in technical and professional communication (TPC). I was at the grocery store and my phone dinged; I had received an email from Natasha Jones. She and her coauthors were writing a book and wanted to include a list of multiply marginalized and underrepresented (MMU) scholars to amplify in its pages. They asked if I wanted to be part of their list and if I knew others who should be added. I emailed back immediately thanking them, consenting, and gave them my friends Zarah Moeggenberg and Les Hutchinson's names. I paid for my groceries, walked out to my truck, and cried.

This study examines a document produced by the United States Department of Homeland Security handed out to immigrant parents during the "Family Separation Policy" crisis of 2018. The article examines whether such a document could be ethically tested for usability. Ultimately, the text argues that by the standards of the Belmont Report and the best practices in usability research, such a document would be extremely difficult (if not impossible) to test ethically. It argues that, while usability testing is an excellent tool for exploring how users interact with texts that can have life-changing consequences, it may also be used as a tool to perpetuate injustice and marginalize potential users.

This article argues for the inclusion of Hip Hop communities in technical communication research. Through Hip Hop, technical communicators can address the recent call for TPC work to expand the field through culturally sensitive and diverse studies that honor communities and their practices. Using a Hip Hop community in Houston as a case study, this article discusses the way DJs operate as technical communicators within their communities. Furthermore, Hip Hop DJs build complex relationships with communities to create localized and accessible content. As technical communicators, Hip Hop practitioners can teach us to create community-based communication design for more diverse contexts.

From the perspective of an instructor who teaches "Productivity and Tools" in a Technical Communication program, many concepts from the essays in Rhetoric and Experience Architecture ring true, such as when the writers say we need to focus on human experiences that are augmented by technology. Students enter my classes, and often the technologies they seek to use are their masters. My wish is that they learn to make those technologies serve them as they go forward to design human interactions with complex systems, and that they become sensitive to multi-faceted scenes of rhetorical relations in user experience (UX). In Rhetoric and Experience Architecture , Potts and Salvo successfully foreground the rhetorical dimensions of user experience.

In 2016, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe founded the Sacred Stone Camp to protest Dakota Access Pipeline construction. The ensuing conflict was constructed both physically and digitally --- especially through maps. These maps made strategic inclusions and exclusions, which in turn offered differing concepts of civic, national, and historical identity. In this study, I trace some of these stories, inviting technical and professional communicators to rethink how they visualize systemic issues involving human and nonhuman ecologies. Finally, I suggest the idea of a 'folded rhetoric' to describe a strategic, ethical goal for technical communication in the age of environmental crisis.

Dear Reader, You've probably heard the story of the city of pigs before, that lovely allegory in Book II of the Republic , where Socrates attempts to prove that justice is not only desirable, but belongs to the highest class of desirable things: those desired for their own sake and consequence. But this is an important story to retell, as it frames the consequence of the scholarship contained in this issue on environmental justice and technical communication in a way that perhaps few other stories can.

Technical communication (TC) practice is changing in significant ways, due largely to maturing technologies and increasing consumer demand for content designed for a multitude of devices and delivery channels. Whereas ten years ago technical communicators primarily produced static documents, today they primarily produce modular content components, the essential building blocks for the vast array of information products (e.g., user guides, training materials, product descriptions) that organizations must deliver in a variety of publishing formats, such as PDFs, websites, embedded user assistance, dynamic delivery, and mobile applications. In addition, technical communicators increasingly contribute to user experience (UX) projects, create video documentation, curate user-generated content, and manage social media communications.

This experience report shares the story of course redesign for cultivating technological and code literacy. This redesign came about as a result of listening to advisory board members as well as responding to recent scholarship calling for more specifics on the teaching of component content management and content strategy. We begin with discussion of code literacy differentiation between code-as-language, code-as-tool, and code-as-structure. We then share detail about our advisory board engagement and the resulting advanced-level technical communication course in which, framed by technological literacy narratives, students produce a static HTML site for a client, develop a repository for this work (GitHub), use XML and the DITA standard for dynamic document delivery, and create a digital experience element to accompany the site. We document and analyze student narratives and online course discussions. We emphasize a more holistic approach to code literacy and that course redesign should be a collaborative endeavor with advisory board members and industry experts. Through these experiences, students gain requisite knowledge and practice so as to enter the technical communication community of practice.

Willerton, R. (2015). Plain Language and Ethical Action: A Dialogic Approach to Technical Communication in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Routledge.

In technical communication, discussions on how to best prepare graduates to meet workplace challenges range from responding to changing technology and occupational needs to focusing on creating flexible workers. Part of this conversation centers on expertise: what kinds of expertise are most valued and how can graduates be trained to be experts? In this article, we explore our field's understandings of expertise by focusing on a recent master's graduate and practitioner, Megan. As first an intern then a full-time employee at HP Inc, Megan experienced clashes between the classroom and workplace, which she sought to reconcile. In addition, she also had to learn to assert herself as a subject matter expert (SME) while working alongside SMEs. This navigation was not something her education necessarily prepared her for, and when compared to surveyed graduates' experiences, may be something programs could emphasize. We conclude with recommendations for how academic programs can incorporate conversations about expertise and equip students to assert themselves as communication SMEs and build on that expertise after graduation.

Preparing students to understand and practice search engine optimization (SEO) teaches them writing skills, technological literacies, and theoretical background needed to pursue a successful technical communication career. SEO employs a multifaceted skillset, including an understanding of coding, skills in shaping and crafting effective user experience (UX), marketing skills, effective research strategies, and competence in accessibility. We argue that instruction in SEO in undergraduate and graduate programs in technical communication prepares graduates for the interdisciplinary and agile profession they seek to enter and enables them to be successful in positions from information architect to technical editor. Our article details how studying and enacting SEO helps students to develop proficiencies and knowledge central to technical communication pedagogies, including technological literacies, an understanding of the interconnections between human and non-human actors in digital spaces, and the ethical concerns central to work within those spaces. We then detail how SEO can be incorporated into technical communication curricula and share details of client-based projects that can facilitate that integration..

This experience report highlights one program's approach to curriculum revision as the program moved from being an emphasis within a literature degree to a B.A. degree in technical communication. The major curriculum was designed by researching state and regional needs for technical communication education in addition to using research already conducted and published in the field. Through an examination of the skills technical communicators needed to be successful in the workplace and how those skills transfer to other related occupations, we were able to build a successful major. The revised curriculum used an interdisciplinary approach to include courses in technical communication, visual design, and public relations. Further, this report discusses the iterative programmatic changes necessary to keep the major current. From alumni interviews and secondary research on changes in technical communication, we continue to reassess the skills students need. As a result our program continues to evolve to equip students with technical communication skills that apply to various, related occupations.

Recent research in technical communication (TC) indicates that the field has become more varied than ever in terms of job titles, job skills, and levels of involvement in the design and production process. Here, we examine this diversity by detailing the results of a small-scale anonymous survey of individuals who are currently working as technical communicators (TCs). The purpose of our survey was to discover what job titles people who identify as TCs have held and the skills required of those positions. The study was conducted using the online survey platform Qualtrics. Survey results found that TCs occupy jobs and use skills that are often quite different from "traditional" TC careers. Results further support previous research that these roles and responsibilities continue to evolve. However, results also suggest that this evolution is more sweeping than previously realized---moving TCs away from not only the traditional technical writing role but also the "technical communicator" role as it has been understood for the past 20--25 years.

Drawing on narratives (Jones, 2016; Jones & Walton, 2018) from bilingual technical communication projects, this article makes a case for the importance of considering language access and accessibility in crafting and sharing digital research. Connecting conversations in disability studies and language diversity, the author emphasizes how an interdependent (Price, 2011; Price & Kerchbaum, 2016), intersectional (Crenshaw, 1989; Medina & Haas, 2018) orientation to access through disability studies and translation can help technical communication researchers to design and disseminate digital research that is accessible to audiences from various linguistic backgrounds and who also identify with various dis/abilities.

Drawing on an analysis of a usability teaching case with users who are deaf and who communicate using American Sign Language, we argue that there is a need for industry and the academy to refocus on more accessible testing practices, situated more decidedly within the social, cultural, and historical contexts of users. We offer guidelines for more inclusive practices for testing with users who are deaf prompting designers, developers, and students to think about systems of behavior, such as audism, cultural appropriation, and technological paternalism that undermine accessibility in their design and practices. More broadly, we propose ways in which instructors of technical communication can leverage usability tools and research methods to help students better understand their users for any artifact they design and create.

This article examines conversation analysis (CA) as a methodology for usability research for technologies used in multiparty contexts. Current laboratory-based usability practices often cannot account for how technologies are used in multi-participant interactions outside of the laboratory. In this article, I review new materialist approaches to usability and consider how CA might be integrated into this theoretical perspective. To do so, I present an example transcript of CA and review CA research on telemedicine in multiparty environments. I use this approach to argue that incorporating CA into a new materialist approach can help usability researchers to reconfigure the technical design of and the socio-material practices surrounding technologies.

This study explores the usability of the Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management's (DHSEM) website, applying theories of user experience design (UXD) to emphasize the importance of responsive web design in practice. By rhetorically analyzing the usability of their websites, such as FEMA and Ready at the national and local level, DHSEM becomes a model for the needs of future research and application of user centered design principles. Responsive web design within emergency management websites should be considered when first evaluating usability and user experience design because of the real-life implications of these interactions. By reviewing basic design principles on emergency management websites, this article further showcases the capabilities responsive web design, usability and user centered design in digital spaces.

This study builds a model of open video game development, an emerging user-centered design practice where a developer publicly releases an incomplete game and iterate on it while gathering feedback from the player community. It argues that open development is fundamentally a communication and user experience practice characterized by a commitment to access, transparency, and feedback. Ultimately, it shows open development as a practice where game developers are consciously designing a compelling experience of participation in user research.

This article examined the usability claims that Electronic Health Records (EHRs) make to healthcare providers. Usability claims appear as statements that persuade users to adopt the interface based on usability or user experience. These claims may show what healthcare providers are presumed to require from online health technologies. Usability claims in this study included intuitive interfaces, adaptability of documentation and records, and supplementing patient communication. Analyzing usability claims then becomes a way of understanding healthcare providers, their patients, and the technologies both use for health communication

Interactive sea level rise viewers (ISLRVs) are an increasingly popular risk communication technology designed to help users visualize the effects of water inundation on their region so as to facilitate more prudent decision-making. Designed by and for a variety of stakeholders, these viewers generally have as their goal affording users a more "localized" experience with climate change and sea level rise data, allowing users to explore as specific as street-level the effects of rising waters in coastal regions. While the rise of these tools mirrors the trend in risk communication scholarship towards more localized messaging, there is still more work to be done in terms of providing a more localized user experience for a broader public audience. This article presents the results of a user experience study conducted with 12 residents of a coastal region, the results of which formulate an attempt to develop more insight into techniques for designer localization. The article concludes with concrete recommendations for scholars and practitioners concerned with designing more effective interactive risk communication technologies that respond to the public need for localized information for decision-making.

Usability involves connecting design to need. Individuals need to achieve an objective; if the design of an item meets that need, the item is usable. If not, it is not. So, usability depends on how well the design of an item addresses the need of the user. The need to hold two items together, for example, can prompt individuals to design a fastener in order to meet that need. The usability of the resulting design, however, is a matter of how effectively the individual can use it to hold items in place.

This special issue contains proceedings from the 6 th Annual Symposium on Communicating Complex Information (SCCI), which ran from February 27 th through 28 th 2017 at East Carolina University in Greenville, NC. The program chair was Michael Albers, who, as usual at SCCI, did a fantastic job at collecting and curating two days of stimulating conversations generated by speakers from a broad range of fields---rhetoric, technical communication, medical and regulatory writing, user experience, information science, and design---and a broad range or institutions and workspaces, including Duke's Network Analysis Center, The Medical University of South Carolina, Mälardalen University in Sweden, and Michigan State University, to name just a few. The keynote---titled "Faulty by Design: A Psychological Examination of User Decision-Making"---was given by Bill Gribbons, director of Bentley University's Graduate User Experience Program. Overall, the diversity and depth of the scholars and their research combined with the single-room presentation space facilitated conversation and networking in ways not typically found at other conferences.

User expectations are often connected to context. This means the better UXD professionals understand connections between location and usability, the greater the chances they can create materials that meet expectations of usability in a particular place. The cognitive factors of prototypes and scripts can provide a foundation for investigating such factors. This entry examines how prototypes of place can help identify aspects of location that influence the usability of items in a space. In so doing, the entry also provides strategies for researching expectations of contexts and usability and using resulting data to guide design practices.

Technical communication skirts the fringes of regulated biomedical research, which generally falls into the purview of specialized regulatory writers. However, a worldwide move toward increasing data transparency in regulatory contexts has resulted in a need for specialized documentation for lay audiences as well as added disclosure of investigational interpretations regarding the benefits and risks of new or experimental therapies. Experts in biomedical writing believe that these materials require additional attention to meet reader needs, an endeavor that falls well within the traditional bailiwick of technical communication. Technical communicators who understand information gathered in regulated biomedical research should be able to improve the general accessibility of this complex information for a general readership; however, knowledge of regulatory practices is a gap in this group.

Rethinking UX requires mapping trends in empirical research to find out how the field has developed. This study addresses that need by analyzing over 400 academic empirical studies published between 2000--2016. Our research questions are, "How have the artifacts, analysis, and methods of UX research changed since the year 2000?" and "Do scholars use research questions and hypotheses to ground their research in UX?" Our research found that services, websites, and imagined objects/prototypes were among the most frequently studied artifacts, while usability studies, surveys, and interviews were the most commonly used methods. We found a significant increase in quantitative and mixed methods studies since 2010. This study showed that only 1 out of every 5 publications employed research questions to guide inquiry. We hope that these findings help UX as a field more accurately and broadly conceive of its identity with clear standards for evaluating existing research and rethinking future research opportunities as a discipline.

In this article, we explore connections among rhetoric, usability studies, user-centered design, and civic engagement as core concepts for developing a systemically aware Rhetoric of Advocacy for technical communicators. We propose a model for visualizing scenarios and stakeholders that is based on the structure of atoms. The Atomic Model for Technical Communication provides a visual model for mapping projects and for framing the kind of dialog that we associate with a Rhetoric of Advocacy.

As wearable medical technologies take on an increasingly prominent role in how health care is delivered, pressure to make the development process for such devices shorter increases. This case study will recount one attempt at a do-it-yourself (DIY) development process and collaborative usability testing. I argue that these efforts can complement traditional usability methods used in the development process of a wearable diabetes technology and provide more immediate access to technologies that can meet the diverse needs of end users. The case involves an open source DIY project developed by parents of children with type 1 diabetes in order to remotely monitor the blood sugar levels of their children.

An important element for global design is an approach that can be used for international (e.g., non-US) users. Such a design approach has to factor in how the user's culture influences how they perceive a design while using their mobile devices across a different culture. As mobile use is expected to grow globally, more mobile interactions will require increasingly robust tools for measuring user experiences across different online and physical channels. This article focuses on how experience mapping, a common user experience (UX) design technique that tells stories about how a user experiences a design as a seamless whole across such channels, can help address global mobile design contexts. To further address such global contexts, this article proposes extending experience mapping by considering the factors of existing infrastructures, global openness to innovation, local user contexts, and local beliefs on the function of technology so that designers of communication can better conceptualize sequences of events of interactions across cultures.

Everything changes over time. Societies evolve, original technologies emerge, and the structure of products shifts to meet the needs of new situations. What constitutes a usable design will similarly change over time. For these reasons, it's important to regularly stop and assess where a field is and what it is doing to determine how well its activities reflect the context in which it exists. Usability and user experience design are no different. This issue of Communication Design Quarterly represents such a reflection and a re-thinking of where the field is at this point in time.

As usability research and user-centered design become more prevalent areas of study within technical and professional communication (TPC), it has become important to examine the best practices in designing courses and programs that help students better understand these concepts. This article reports on a case study about how usability research and user-centered design were introduced to TPC students. The article examines how students responded to and articulated new concepts and looks forward to ways TPC programs can develop comprehensive curricula that introduces students to these topics.

Framework negotiation is a mixed-methods research approach to help a UXD researchers uncover the relationship between cross-cultural identity and location. In this study, surveys initially located connections between conceptions of the self and symbolic pathways. Then, community-based research and usability testing verified root metaphors for website navigation. This mixed-methods research uncovered how Kenyans ported navigational strategies from other institutional settings. The article outlines the creation of the research instrument, describes how early data collection guided later data collection, and finally details how the methods uncovered user significance through metaphor.

Technical communicators should be conscious of how the algorithms that govern "middleware" (software that structures the presentation of data) constrain their ability to represent information. We use critical theory from the digital humanities to discuss how critical visual literacy allows designers to better present contextual information to enhance the user experience. We illustrate this approach with an example of medical communication by using social network analysis software to demonstrate the spread of Ebola in Africa.

Using the data generated by both consumer- and medically-oriented wearable devices to assess and improve fitness, wellbeing, and specific health outcomes demands attention to the user experiences of such devices as well as to the kinds of claims being made about their promise (cf. Gouge & Jones, 2016). This special issue participates in such work by presenting case studies situated at the intersections of wearables, communication design, and rhetorical analysis that explore the health, justice, and wellness-oriented promises of specific wearables. In this introduction, we briefly survey the research on wearables in the fields of rhetoric and technical communication, preview the essays in the collection, and propose some areas for future work that might be of interest to technical communication, communication design, and rhetoric scholars.

As wearables become increasingly prevalent, there is a concurrent and growing expectation that we use these devices to track and monitor our bodily states in order to be responsible "biocitizens." To mitigate this, some health, design, and usability scholars have advocated for greater patient control over health data. To support these efforts, this article offers a set of criteria for analyzing wearables, criteria that account for the handling of data and user connections via wearables as they relate to three priorities: accessibility, adaptability, and iterability. These are meant to support analyses that will clarify the ways wearables can more ethically serve end-users'---that is, patients' and wearers'---emerging needs, rather than primarily serving the intermediary goals of care delivery personnel and systems to monitor and manage patient behavior. To do this, this article addresses the usability of wearables as it relates to other critical care issues, such as "information integrity" and enabling patients to maintain their own health records and participate in shared decision making.

This paper examines how the cognitive framework of collective mindfulness complements tenets of user experience in public health crisis communication. Collective mindfulness attunes an organization into preemptively identifying and avoiding potential failures that can have adverse safety and public relations outcomes. To illustrate the connection between this cognitive framework and user experience, this article shares findings from a case study with the 2014 Johns Hopkins Medicine Ebola Crisis Communications Team, whose primary goals were to improve the usability of Ebola personal protective equipment protocols and to prepare healthcare providers for a U.S. Ebola crisis. Based on a grounded theory investigation, this article suggests that the collective mindfulness principles of deference to expertise, resilience, and refusal to simplify complex procedures informed the team's ability to avoid a catastrophic communication failure. Additionally, these principles allowed the team to attune to key user experience principles, including addressing user context and user limitations.

The concept of usability is often connected to the setting - or context - in which individuals perform an activity. International settings complicate such relationships by introducing new variables that affect usability in different locations. In international health and medical communication, this situation can create problems that affect the health and wellness of patients in other nations and cultures. International patient experience design (I-PXD) presents a heuristic for addressing this situation. I-PXD helps individuals identify variables affecting usability in different international contexts. Persons working in health and medical communication can use this I-PXD heuristic to address usability expectations in various international contexts.

Successfully engaging in a health- or medical-related activity is a matter of understanding what one needs to do. This means information used in this context needs to be easy to use. Accomplishing the goals laid out in the essay will facilitate understanding and allow for effective use. Thus, successful medical and health communication are connected to one central concept: usability. But how to achieve this goal? The answer is through patient-focused design practices that help mirror the experiences of patients who are using such materials. This entry overviews such an approach - which I call patient experience design (PXD) - and explains why such an approach is central to best health and medical communication practices.

As a scholar who works at the intersections of technical communication and rhetoric of science, I like to think I know a little bit about effective approaches to communicating technical information. For over a decade, I've been a happy member of a seemingly productive research discipline devoted to understanding how best to communicate scientific and technical information to clients, stakeholders, employers, funders, and the general public. I am, of course, not alone in these endeavors and my work benefits substantially from the efforts of my many colleagues in the Association for Teachers of Technical Writing and the Association for the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine. Now, given this background, imagine my surprise when one of my colleagues forwarded me a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine decrying the state of science communication research in America. Indeed, I was shocked and saddened to see the report call for "building a coherent science communication research enterprise" with the obvious implication that no such enterprise currently exists (p. 74).

Teaching user experience (UX) can be challenging due to the situated, complex, and messy nature of the work. However, the complexity of UX in practice is often invisible to students learning these methods and practices for the first time in class. In this article, we present findings from a study of rhetorical strategies of UX practitioners and pair them with strategies for teaching UX to students. While previous work on teaching UX reflects current practices in the classroom or reflections of practitioners, this study demonstrates the benefits of researching existing industry practices in order to inform pedagogy.

Ray Gallon's collection The Language of Technical Communication attempts to standardize the terminology used in the field by offering concise definitions for 52 key terms, each authored by a contributor with relevant expertise. As a reference work, this book resists summarization. In this review, I will instead assess the text according to criteria appropriate for a reference: ease of use, selection of included terms, and quality of the definitions provided. Although Gallon forwards no explicit thesis, by prioritizing information related to content management, the book does make a claim about the future of communication design. Individuals who are new to the field or whose responsibilities are expanding into content management will find The Language of Technical Communication valuable, while scholars and experienced communication designers will appreciate the contributors' consistent emphasis on the future of the discipline.