Professional practices in technical communication are increasingly being challenged by the emergence of collaborative media that enable users to access technical information created by non-professionals. At the same time, these technologies also allow technical communicators to provide a continually expanding audience with knowledge and skills needed now more than ever. Through a co-design case study, researchers developed a new and innovative platform for producing and distributing technical information including user-generated content. Moreover, the events of the case included market strategies in which a professional organization moved from a reactive to a more proactive position on collaborative media. In so doing, they outlined a set of new professional roles for technical communicators including editors, curators, facilitators, and community managers.

This entry defines value from users' perspectives and discusses the need to consider "user value" as an important framework for enhancing product usability in technical communication. Arguing it is essential to involve users in the process of product design, the paper emphasizes the need to recognize users as value co-creators. To further enhance and extend the study of usability, this article proposes a value proposition approach to design and notes such an approach can help communication designers effectively design, test, and deliver materials end users want and value.

On 9--10 October 2013, the information system research group at Mid Sweden University arranged an international scientific meeting on the theme Technical Information (TI). The event's organizers consciously kept the theme broad, but they also intentionally paired this general theme with a number of subthemes, namely Organizational Learning, Information Design, Information Management and Organizational Benefit. The objective of this design was to examine this overall topic from a range of perspectives.

Technical support, a traditional practice of technical communication, is rapidly changing due to the ubiquitous use of digital technologies (Spinuzzi, 2007). In fact, many technology companies now have dedicated Twitter accounts specifically for providing technical support to end users. In response to this changing technical support landscape, we conducted an empirical study of Twitter-based interactions among six companies and their customers in order to examine the nature of the emerging technical support genre on Twitter. Among other findings, we discovered technical support was widely sought among the customers of the companies studied (Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Samsung, Hewlett Packard, and Dell) with nearly 200,000 tweets recorded in just a 38-day timespan. We also found a majority of individuals used Twitter to complain about a brand as opposed to seeking support for a specific technical problem. In our entry, we discuss the implications of these and other findings for technical communication practitioners and researchers who design for technical documentation in social media contexts.

The help documentation landscape has changed with the growth of various forms of social media. People now post how-to videos to YouTube, they write crowdsourced documentation for open-source software, and they participate in and draw from a wide range of help forums. These forums are a form of crowdsourced help information in which experts and amateurs come together to address questions and explain materials. While these online forums can be thought of as a threat to the roles of technical communicators, they also present opportunities for professionals to adapt their skills to new roles as "community managers" of professionally sponsored forums. This article examines that point by showing how communication design is important for developing online help forum communities. Through the analysis of ethnographic and interview data, the article covers different areas of design important for understanding help forums as networked forms of technical communication.

This article examines the 2014 Sino-American University Student Digital Micro Film Competition, a collaboration developed and administered between the University of Central Florida in the United States and Shanghai University in the People's Republic of China (PRC). By using qualitative text analysis and visual content analysis to review key materials and events from this case, the researchers studied information design and cross-cultural communication practices of various aspects of the partnership. The resulting analysis reveals unique information design challenges associated with cultural differences in communication practices, visual design, and administrative style. The summary of the case and the results of the related research presented here also provide readers with information design strategies that can facilitate design practices---and the associated coordination of event planning---across different cultural groups.

Intercultural professional communication (IPC) requires a nuanced understanding of international users' interactions with technology and information. This requirement poses a distinct challenge to international communication and information designers who must overcome geographic, linguistic, and cultural barriers to understanding users as complex agents. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) annually publishes aHuman Development Report (HDR)that contains high-quality international statistics on the regional, national, and transnational contexts in which individuals use technology and information. Thus, the HDR can serve as a resource for communication designers working in international contexts. This article presents strategies for how communication designers might use the HDR when designing materials for users in other cultures as well as use when teaching international aspects of professional writing/communication."

As state and federal legislation continues to regulate women's reproductive health, it follows that the field of technical communication must continue to develop methodologies to facilitate stakeholder participation in health policymaking practices. Scott's (2003) scholarship on HIV testing and his "ethic of responsiveness" serve as a foundation for methods to broaden stakeholder participation. Yet, as current legislation attempts to regulate health decisions of female bodies, more explicit feminist methods inviting feminist perspectives to resist such anti-feminist legislation must be developed. Frost's (2013, 2014a, 2014b) apparent feminism serves as a useful methodology that builds upon Scott's methods to enact feminist interventional methods. This article provides a case study of the reVITALize Gynecology infertility initiative, a health intervention project that appears to function as an ally of apparent feminism. Applying an apparent feminist analysis to the initiative reveals limitations of the project's feminist commitments. To address the limitations of the initiative, the article articulates the need to expand apparent feminism's methodology by accounting for stakeholder participation throughout health intervention projects. This article posits that expanding feminist approaches to designing public stakeholder input is vital to upholding technical communication's commitment to advocacy and an ethical feminist commitment to facilitating spaces for all citizens to contribute as public intellectuals.

In technical communication education, design is often narrowly and essentially framed as execution of features. This approach fails to account for the innovative phase of user research, the iterative design process, and contextual factors such as workflow and governance. Inspired by Alan Cooper's Goal-Directed Design (2014), this paper advocates for a "design strategy" approach to the practice and pedagogy of design in technical communication. In particular, it calls for treating design as a process of research, discovery, prototyping, execution, and evaluation. This design process must strategically serve organizational objectives and user goals.

Increasingly, health and medical communication involves a global perspective. This perspective now includes coordinating international efforts ranging from treating globally dispersed patients to containing infectious diseases. In many cases, the focus of such information is instructional---content that tells individuals how to perform certain health-or medical-related processes. In such situations, usability is essential to success. That is, individuals must be able to use instructional materials as intended to achieve a particular purpose or objective. Communication designers therefore need to identify approaches that can facilitate the usability of health and medical content in a range of international settings.

Though usability is a must for all new applications, small organizations often lag behind in this area. This trend is frequently posed as a resource problem: User Experience design (UX) teams, usability testing software, and professional web developers are typically lacking in cash-strapped small businesses, non-profits, and educational institutions, so creating cutting-edge designs may seem impossible. We propose that what is lacking in these settings is actually knowledge of effective design workflows, however, not resources. What is lacking is a sound understanding of UX and an effective means of mobilizing existing resources. Based on a case study of a redesign process for a mobile application, we present evidence that all organizations can build awesome applications if they simply learn how to better manage their design processes.

This paper argues that online communication products should employ item-to-item collaborative filtering algorithms to equip readers with the best potential sets of information that fits their specific contexts. Many online resources are utilizing item-to-item collaborative filtering algorithms which harness the decisions of users to affect their experience. Examples include the recommendation engine used by Amazon.com to help steer customers to products they might enjoy, the "Music Genome Project" used by the internet radio platform, Pandora, and various user interfaces that quickly determine the best user experience to present each individual user.

This paper explores the potential for technical communicators to employ usability research with risk-based interactive geovisualization technologies as a method of cultivating "critical rhetorics of risk communication" for local communities. Through integrating theories from usability studies and risk communication, I offer some new directions for thinking about the productive usability of online, participatory technologies that promote citizen engagement in science. I argue that the key tenets of productive usability afford technical communicators the opportunity to build localized knowledge of risk in real, local users, which in turn improves the capacity for a community and its stakeholders to more effectively communicate risk.

Extending digital products and services to global markets requires a communication design approach that considers the needs of international (e.g. non-U.S.) users. The challenge becomes developing an approach that works effectively. The concept of personas, as applied in user experience design (UX), can offer an effective solution to this situation. This article examines how this idea of personas can expand communication design practices to include users form other cultures.

Everyday spaces and places are increasingly experienced as hybrid---as a confluence of material and informatic possibility---thanks to the ubiquity of always connected mobile devices and robust sociotechnical networks. For example, the interiors of many contemporary vehicles are personal area networks that move with drivers through daily commutes, connecting them to their phone's text messages and social networks in and through the material space of their car. In such cases, communication flows strongly mediate people's experiences in, movements through, and perceptions toward spaces of work, learning, and leisure. This article explores such hybrid spaces from the perspective of communication design, offering a heuristic approach to user experience in a world where spaces are often crosshatched and multiple. This exploration focuses on the kinds of tools and practices common to knowledge work and its recent extensions into forms of knowledge play, where the means of knowledge work are coordinated and transformed for non-work pursuits. This article, then, presents a practical, persona driven perspective on the relationships between communication flows and hybrid spaces, challenging design of communication researchers and user experience professionals to rethink the everyday combinations of symbolic action, knowledge work tools and networks, and mundane locations and movements.

In my last column, I wrote about the need for a more integrated view of the field of technical communication. I suggested that the more our field is able to collaborate and integrate with other fields that have a stake in content management (CM), the more our field's unique perspectives, knowledge, and strategies will be recognized for the value they add to the CM discourse. This discourse, which includes a collective of industry conferences, publications, blogs, online discussions and workshops and Webinars, focuses a great deal on how best to integrate organizational and user generated content as well as disciplines and departments, expertise and roles, and business processes and tools.

If you've been in the field of user experience design, usability testing, or marketing for anytime at all, you've almost certainly come across the use of personas to help members of a cross functional design team communicate with one another about the impacts that design decisions will have on a particular user demographic. As Adlin and Pruitt (2006) explain, personas are useful because they put an individual, human face on demographic and ethnographic data which would otherwise be difficult to explain to software engineers, project managers, information product developers, and other stakeholders in a way they can easily conceptualize and apply. Usually on one sheet of paper, a persona will provide a photo of the character for the persona; a memorable name for the persona; a short bio or background information about the persona; the persona's goals for using the product being developed; a short and memorable quote from the persona which usually conveys their ethos ; and other information relevant to the use of the product being designed such as training; previous experience with similar products, or physical disabilities (such as arthritis or poor eye sight---see http://www.clemson.edu/caah/caah_mockups/persona_clemsongrad.html for an example of personas developed for the redesign of a College's website).

In Huatong Sun's recent book, Cross-cultural technology design: Creating culture-sensitive technology for local users , the author presents a study of text messaging usage in both American and Chinese culture. Sun introduces the field to her "design philosophy and model of Culturally Localized User Experience" or "CLUE" (xiv-xv). Using the CLUE approach, Sun explores the differences in how a technology such as text messaging has developed, and has been interpreted by users, within each culture, including case studies of specific users. Sun breaks up her book into three distinctive parts: Grounding, Experiences, and Implications.

The culture we are part of tells us what aspects of design constitute "good" both in terms of aesthetics and usability. When it comes to technologies, these factors must be addressed for a given item to be successfully adopted by and correctly used within a particular culture. To put these ideas into practice, consider the following: A given interface might be very easy for the members of a particular culture to use, but if its aesthetic appeal is so jarring that individuals avoid it almost instinctively (i.e., before they actually use it), then the benefits of that interface are lost. Similarly, an aesthetically appealing interface might entice the members of a given culture to try it, but if the interface is difficult to use, then the initially interested audience is likely to abandon it. Effective communication design for international contexts thus becomes a matter of recognizing and addressing both aspects associated with "good." And as online media increasingly link the world together via information technologies, the need to understand and address such factors becomes increasingly important.

By describing cultural usability work as "information architecture," I knew I would be waging a continuous rearguard battle with database designers. Eventually the cost of bickering over turf outweighed the clarity the term brought, even considering its lineage. Richard Saul Wurman first recognized Information Anxiety in the late 1980s and described those working as Information Architects in the 1990s. Here, I remind readers that Wurman goes by the nickname "Ted." Wurman's vision of widespread attention to Technology, Education, and Design resulting in the popular TED talks---although he has an uneasy relationship with his own creation. "When he speaks about TED Talks, he clearly struggles to identify with the organisation today and is adamant that it has lost its vision." [http://www.universityobserver.ie/2012/10/31/interview-richard-saul-wurman-ted-talks/] At our current moment of media convergence, it helps to remember that the 20 minute flipped pedagogical lecture itself is the result of thirty years of dedication to disseminating disruptive ideas. If Ted Wurman can let TED go, I can let go of Information Architecture.

This paper introduces a novel comparative strategy to access, synthesize, and redesign a mobile visual analytics (VA) system. Designing, evaluating, and improving VA tools are challenging because of the exploratory and unpredicted nature of their users' analysis activities in a real context. Often the system development approach is running rounds of iteration based on one or a few design ideas and related references. Inspired by ideation and design selection from design-thinking literature, we start to redesign systems from comparison and filtering based on a broad range of design ideas. This approach focuses on the information interaction design of systems; integrates design principles from information design, sensorial design, and interaction design as guidelines; compares VA systems at the component level; and seeks unique and adaptive design solutions. The Visual Analytics Benchmark Repository provides a rich collection of the Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST) challenges submission reports and videos. For each challenge design problem, there are multiple creative and mature design solutions. Based on this resource, we conducted a series of empirical user studies to understand the user experience by comparing different design solutions, enhanced one visual analytics system design MobileAnalymator by synthesizing new features and removing redundant functions, and accessed the redesign outcomes with the same comparative approach.

The approach to usability adopted by many technical communication programs often conceptually separates usability from other subject matter areas and places it at the tail-end of a project. Such an approach creates conceptual barriers with regard to how usability fits in a design project. As a result, students do not engage in the critical work of designing and testing iteratively in the formative phase of a product. We should broaden usability into user experience, enable students to see user experience as an iterative and agile process, and provide in-depth knowledge of user research methods.

Liza Potts' recent book, Social media in disaster response: How experience architects can build for participation , explores the ways in which social web tools provide researchers and practitioners with opportunities to address disaster communication and information design for building participatory cultures. All too often, researchers and design practitioners in both the academy and industry think of social web tools as static, as "single-serving interfaces, systems, documents and silos" (1). In order to meet the progressive needs of contemporary knowledge workers, interdisciplinary teams that include humanists, social scientists, and technologists must build better architectures for everyday experiences users encounter in social media. Although issues of social media experience and participation may seem of concern to only a small group of information and experience designers---or, "experience architects," as Potts terms them---Potts argues that anyone who cares about writing, communication, social web design, and development should be deeply concerned with these issues, especially as they relate to how information is located and distributed as knowledge across the social web during times of disaster.

In Global UX: Design and research in a connected world , Quesenbery and Szuc present a thoughtful and adaptable guide for the reader's individual needs or projects in relation to UX (user experience), regardless of the reader's experience level. Quesenbery and Szuc gathered material from 65 interviews of UX practitioners across the globe, and analyzed over 70 hours of interviews to represent current trends and personal experiences with UX. To highlight different voices and perspectives gathered from the interviews, the authors chose to provide multiple quotations and anecdotal, yet practical, stories to define UX terminology and concepts. Quesenbery and Szuc share many effective strategies for this process, while highlighting, through vignettes from their interviews, some of the difficulties and problem-solving strategies useful when working in UX on a global (or even local) scale. The book is divided into short, easily digestible chapters with infographics that summarize each chapter succinctly. This book provides enough structure to guide novice UX practitioners, while providing innovative anecdotes, tips, and strategies for more seasoned practitioners, as well. In addition, the information gathered from the interviews highlights the passion of those in UX, helping the reader to feel passionate about UX as well.

For the past few years, I have attended a number of industry conferences focused on content management (CM); reviewed a wealth of CM-focused publications, including trade books, white papers, newsletters, and blogs; and followed numerous CM-focused online discussions. Through these experiences and readings I have learned a great deal about the affordances and challenges of CM. But the message that has most impacted my thinking about CM---and what it means for the field of Technical Communication (TC)---is this: the era of document-based information development (ID), which has shaped all aspects of TC research, training, and practice since the field's inception, is coming to an end.

Meloncon's Rhetorical Accessability explores the connections between critical work in disability studies and technical communication. The first collection of its kind, included essays combine theory and practice to emphasize the value of placing disability studies at the forefront of design, workplace practices, and pedagogies. Echoing the diversity of scholarship that has contributed to this emerging area of study---from disability studies, technical communication, rhetoric, and literacy studies--- the collection emphasizes technical communication as a crucial multidisciplinary ground for critical discourse regarding disability and accessibility. As a whole, Meloncon's collection initiates a broader scholarly conversation centered on issues of accessibility in various technical communication contexts.

Immediately, the Preface and introduction of Rex Hartson and Pardha A. Pyla's (2012) co-authored The UX Book: Process and Guidelines for Ensuring a Quality User Experience , grounds the reader in a specific overview of the practical and pedagogical components of the UX design process. The practical aspect of the text centers on what the authors call the UX lifecycle, a highly structured framework that orchestrates the many different design and evaluative stages of system or product completion. The pedagogical approach of the text is an awareness of audience that translates into a customizable book. Both authors encourage their readers to decide what parts of the text are of interest and to focus on those sections only. Central to the text's overall approach is the refrain "user experience is more than usability" (pg. xi). Within this approach, for instance, Hartson and Pyla address some of the ineffective metaphors that cloud or muddle the UX lifecycle process. Previous models often rely on testing, or lab-based metaphors that fail to generate a quality user experience. With the rise of design-oriented techniques today, the development process has been wrested from previously-held beliefs that a system or product can be generated independent of the user's environment.

This paper describes the studies undertaken in order to improve and simplify communication of health information for a Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) devices, specifically the BL Healthcare Access Tablet, to older adults. Current icon and information design of the RPM devices are not well designed to reflect the needs, experiences and limitations of the older adults. In addition to this, compliance with self-management schedules is often poor due to complex and unclear instructions and information design. The issue of compliance, with the need for effective communication between chronic disease patients and healthcare professionals emphasize the need for the appropriate information design and communication technology. Communication of health information was improved from the perspective of the user experience (UX) design and information design. For the purpose of addressing the UX redesign, usability studies were conducted, followed by the information redesign and icons design. Although medical peripherals, such as an electronic thermometer, are required to measure the patient information, a mobile or tablet application can easily be used to record, send and view this data. A concept for the RPM mobile application is developed, that could be used on existing tablets and smartphones, thus eliminating the need for the current costly hardware.

One significant concern I have for the future of technical communication, a concern I often share with my students, involves the impact of "big data." Though the term is frequently used with a sneer, or at least a slightly unsettled laugh, the methods for retrieving information from large data sets are improving as I write this. One significant question the field faces is: "what new relationships will develop and what new work will technical communicators be responsible for in emergent big data projects, in coming years?"

To identify some of the research questions and needs of most importance to industry professionals and academics, we conducted a Technical Communication Industry Research Survey that posed a common set of questions about research. Here we report the results, which suggest some differing priorities for academics and industry professionals, but also some shared priorities that might help guide disciplinary research, including content strategy, user behavior, metrics/measurements, and process/practices.

A research question that I believe will be important for technical communication practitioners and scholars in the next decade is as follows How do we do develop big data methods for locating and studying web-based technical communication artifacts?

As a scholarly researcher and architect working in industry, the most critical questions facing communication designers tackle complex ecosystems of people, technologies, and culturally situated practices. The field of Technical Communication is uniquely equipped to tackle these challenges (Hart-Davidson, 2001). Carolyn Rude (2009) states that scholars in the field of Technical Communication must explore how "texts (print, digital, multimedia, visual, verbal) and relative communication practices mediate knowledge, values, and action in a variety of social and professional contexts" (p. 176). She argues that research within the field must be situated at the intersection of creative practices that produce different types of texts, the cultures that provide meaningful context to such activities, and the technologies that support the production of both texts and meaning. But, where does Rude's call to action point Technical Communication as a field, now? What new research questions have emerged at the intersection that she describes?

We believe that one of the major research questions that will drive the field of technical communication during the next 5--10 years is, "How can technical communication scholars navigate increasingly cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary, and cross-organizational contexts to support social justice through better communication?"

Distinct from prose essays as cultural expression, we use technical communication for functional purposes, addressing questions of how people learn as we craft our communications. Aristotle set out psychological principles of how people learn -- or are persuaded to change their minds -- when he laid down his foundational advice for rhetors to cultivate "the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion on almost any subject presented to us." Building on this foundational principle, technical communicators since World War II have studied how to achieve persuasion (or change) by making information accessible, formatting documents, writing at designated reading levels, and setting out instruction steps clearly. Recently, we have also become interested in how, through the concept of rhetoric, oral and written language acquires poignant social, ethical and technical dimensions, situating Aristotle's "faculties" of persuasion within specific cultural and political contexts.

This position paper proposes the undertaking of a systematic research agenda on the tangled questions of accessibility, technology, and disability from the perspective of Technical Communication field. O'Hara (2004), Oswal and Hewett (2013), Palmeri (2006), Porter (1997), Ray and Ray (1999), Salvo (2005), Slatin and Rush (2003), Theofanos and Redish (2003 and 2005), and Walters (2010), have approached accessibility issues in various Technical Communication contexts and have emphasized the need for more attention to accessibility in our research, teaching, and practice. Likewise, the major journals in our field-- Technical Communication, Technical Communication Quarterly and the IEEE Transactions in Professional Communication ---have also published at least one special issue EACH on the topic of accessibility. While all this sporadic research has appeared on accessibility-related topics in different venues, this research has not yet gained the type of traction one would generally expect from an area with such a growth potential. As a user-centered discipline, we also ought to remember that presently 57.8 million Americans have one or more disabilities. Among the U.S. veteran population alone, 5.5 million are disabled. And, if we consider the reach of our Technical Communication work via the World Wide Web, this planet has 1 billion people with disabilities who can be affected by our accessibility research (National Center for Disability, 2013).

In this paper, we discuss the use of visual representations to assist people in understanding complex information about sea level rise and climate change. We report on the results of a 2011 study in which we conducted plus-minus document usability evaluations of documents describing the mechanisms and consequences of sea-level rise in coastal areas. The protocol included 40 participant interviews and post interview quizzes. We tested with three documents, one that presented information for the U.S. southeastern coastal region and two that presented information "localized" for the two areas in which we conducted the research. Findings indicate that participants had difficulty with information presented in graphs and maps and that, while they indicated preferences for localized information, localized images did not improve understanding of complex information.

In this paper, we illustrate how merging contract design with information design, especially visualization, can help to transform contracts (and people's perceptions about contracts) from legal rules to communication tools. We argue that improved human-contract interaction can maximize the value of commercial relationships, minimize risk, and prevent workplace frustration. Viewing contracts as boundary objects and changing their design to overcome the current challenges offer unexplored opportunities for both research and practice.

Today, the process of image management is extremely time-consuming for IT administrators. Until now, this complicated process has not been extensively explored by design researchers. During a recent research study at Citrix, we interviewed 17 IT professionals. We used a process we call "adaptive interviewing," a flexible methodology that could accommodate the various infrastructures of IT organizations and the diversity of ways that administrators handle image management. While conducting our interviews, we worked with our information designer to create several visualizations of our data. Ultimately, we found that supplementing interviews with information visualizations is a powerful way to explore, understand, and explain the complex system of IT image management.

There are a multitude of rules of writing and design. Cargo cult design occurs when designers rigidly apply a design rule without a clear understanding of why the rule exists or whether it applies to the situation. The rules moved into the status of being a rule for a reason. It is important for designers to understand those reasons so they can critically analyze the situation and make decisions about the applicability of the rule. Successful design requires deeply understanding and working within the situational context and not blindly applying generic rules.

As usability experts describe the appropriate models for writing in digital, they consistently express the need to write in a user-centric format. While I agree with the importance of efficient navigation in Web content, I suggest that user-centric writing only applies to part of the content we find in a website. Other styles of writing are almost always required. Two additional styles are persuasion-centric and quality-centric writing. These two styles are required by almost all marketing writing and especially marketing writing for the prosumer community. In this article I extend the ideas found in user centered design to include user-centric, persuasion-centric, and quality-centric writing (which combination I call ReaderCentric writing ). I believe this impacts information architecture in a number of important ways, perhaps most notably in the way the various writing styles impact the mindset of the information architect. I will explain why these writing models are important and demonstrate what happens when the models are ignored or not understood, plus how they may be successfully applied to marketing documents on the Internet. Finally, I will speculate on how information architecture may be adjusted to meet the needs of the content, writer, and reader.

In 2011, I faced a complex research problem: how could mobile device user experience (HCMVX) of visitors to Humboldt County, California, be measured and improved? Mobile visitors are visitors who actively use their smart mobile devices, like smart phones and iPads but not laptops, while on vacation. In 2011, there were no official records or policies regarding mobile visitors and little local awareness of mobile tourism in Humboldt County. No one had measured mobile visitors' experience in Humboldt County and few officials had any idea on how to improve these visitors' experiences. This information and policy gap also meant there was no clear way to contact mobile visitors or arrange for mobile usability tests. I faced a complex system with no clear starting point. Traditional usability methods did not initially help because the majority of usability methods rely on clearly identified users, tasks, or goals. While I planned to use traditional usability methods once the users and usability problem(s) were identified, it was necessary to first locate and identify the users and their tasks and goals. Using Deleuze's assemblage concept, I approached the complex system of HCMVX, identified potential points of engagement, conducted field research and interviews, analyzed, and wrote up my results in less than six months. Local officials took my results and reshaped part of their policies and merchant training based on my data and conclusion. Deleuze's assemblage offers usability practitioners a means to approach complex systems and rapidly identify points of engagement.

Traditional usability firms (or usability groups within large companies) tend to focus on evaluation, and their design process typically ends at the Discover phase. For organizations (or individuals) that tout themselves as "User Experience", the goal is to have the research and data dictate design, going so far as to have the research person creating wireframes - defining screen layout, interaction models and information architecture. After all, isn't a research-based interface what we're after?

This poster reports data from a pilot study of communication practices in the microblogging site Twitter. A content analysis was conducted on a random sample of 50 tweets from the #hpv (human papillomavirus) stream in order to determine any recurring practices such as use of links, retweets, uses of the @ symbol, and other phenomena. The pilot study found that, unlike studies conducted on communication patterns in Twitter streams, the participants in the #hpv stream use it to primarily broadcast information as opposed to interacting and conversing with one another, and collaboration, while present indirectly, is minimal. The researcher plans to expand the sample set to 900 tweets and continue the process of content analysis in order to determine more solid findings for practices of communication in this space. The researcher also plans to examine other spaces relevant to the exchange of information on HPV, conduct content analyses for them, and compare them to the findings on Twitter. The goal is to use these findings for both health and technical communication so that better systems can be designed to optimize the power of participant generated information spaces.

Welcome to your newly redesigned SIGDOC newsletter. Nearly a year ago, we began having conversations about publishing opportunities for cutting-edge (and often bleeding-edge) research in our field. The kind of work that includes pilot studies, exploratory research happening inside labs, centers, and in the field. The kind of work that has trouble getting recognition and funding because it is new, does not have years of research behind it, and is often risky to take on. Cutting-edge work is also the kind of research and application work that needs to find a publishing venue as quickly as possible to encourage further exploration, discussion, and refinement. Other relevant work would be surprising and interesting results of a usability test or development project. Although this work may not be as bleeding edge (and may not even qualify as a "full research project,") the knowledge the project team gained can help other groups and needs a venue on which that communication can occur.

What is communication design? The term may represent, along with technical communication, information design, and content development, the latest permutation of how the work once known as technical writing has been re-named and re-professionalized. This is a reductive answer, of course, since the terms emphasize different qualities of that work and all are pinchy and baggy as generic descriptors. A different answer is that the term communication design captures an awareness that our field lacks a center. It has its genres and its processes, but as Johnson-Eilola and Selber (in press) argue, it is the focus on defining and solving problems in novel ways and in response to the exigencies of highly varied situations that underscores the importance of what we do. I prefer to see communication design as an embrace of that role, a recognition that the scope of our concern is broad: it is communication. It is also constructive work, aimed at producing concrete effects in the world. It is not just writing; it is design.

Ask 10 technical communicators to define information design, and you're likely to get as many very different answers (Redish, 2000). Despite the variety, however, I think that most definitions of information design correspond more or less to one of the following approaches.