In User Experience Research and Usability of Health Information Technology , Jessica Lynn Campbell offers a guide on the design and implementation of usability studies to improve the user experience with health information technology (HIT). HIT is a broad and growing category, which includes applications such as telemedicine, electronic health records, and electronic communications between healthcare providers and patients. Given the increasing use of HIT, this is a welcome resource for both researchers and practitioners interested in improving user experiences and, ultimately, positive health outcomes. Campbell brings strong professional experience in the healthcare field, having worked in digital marketing, technical communication, and content creation roles. She is also an accomplished teacher and researcher within the technical communication and user experience disciplines. She draws on this diverse background to create a text intended for use by both academic scholars and healthcare practitioners.

In this experience report, we share our strategies for scaffolding and supporting instruction in empathy in a first-year Engineering Design studio course. Empathy is a key component of UX and design, but as Tham argued, it is a difficult skill that requires practice and critical application. Community engagement scholars have long argued that community-engaged projects help foster that empathy. Our teaching case will show how emphasizing content knowledge about user groups and creating an empathetic classroom environment impacts student designers' ability to empathize in the design process.

Design systems provide a useful approach for TPC instructors looking to teach students to design and build accessible digital products. This experience report presents a teaching unit on using design systems to introduce accessibility to students. Using the Bootstrap design system, accessibility is threaded throughout the design process and provides a grounded approach for integrating accessible design into the UX classroom. Readers will come away with an outline of the teaching unit, accompanying materials for teaching that unit, and student examples user-tested for accessibility. The author concludes on a reflection on teaching the unit and offers advice for readers looking to implement a similar unit in their own courses.

Over the course of my friendship with Dr. Halcyon Lawrence, I would often spend weekday evenings completing a mundane chore like washing dishes or feeding the cat. I would then hear my phone's alert for an incoming text message: "I need company. Are you working tonight?" Within 30 minutes or so Halcyon and I were on Zoom, cameras off, and nothing displayed on screen but our login names. Other times I'd receive a text like "I need your advice. Do you have time?" and we convened over the phone. When we talked, answers to our mutual question "How was your day?" prompted stories, and those stories led to musings and reflections. When I became befuddled when an assignment would flop or disappointed by a flat discussion, Halcyon gently queried, "So what were you trying to do?" or "Why do you think that activity didn't go well?" Her responses always reoriented me. When venting was no longer productive, we teased apart the problem, speculating what skill or knowledge students needed but had not sufficiently developed. These conversations often gave me enthusiasm for a new pedagogical approach or revealed insights about the gaps in our teaching and our students' learning. In the months since Halcyon's passing, I miss most acutely these nightly conversations about what was happening in our classrooms. My goal in this essay is to underscore the fact that part of Halcyon's legacy as a social justice-oriented technical communication scholar is her ethos as a teacher and collaborator who cared capaciously about student learning and the development of teaching practices and assignments.

This article reports on a study about design thinking pedagogy in technical communication courses taken by engineering students. The study suggests that design thinking pedagogy can foster engineering students' empathy for users, particularly their ability to recognize the feelings, knowledge, and perspectives of others. However, its findings reinforce the difficulty faced when encouraging students' societal-level empathy and the limitations of empathy. While engineering students may struggle to transfer user empathy to courses in their major, this study found that engineering students believe design thinking has relevance to their future careers. This article offers teaching strategies and project ideas for technical and professional communication instructors to facilitate students' ability to transfer user empathy to their disciplines.

This teaching case applies design thinking to a large-scale client project in a technical and professional communication (TPC) class. Using the 5-step design thinking process ("empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test") over 8 weeks, the students in an upper-division TPC course developed social media content and strategy for a statewide public relations campaign. The two authors, the instructing faculty and a senior student who served as project manager, illuminate how iterative design thinking, as a UX pedagogical practice, can help students set boundaries around ill-defined problems; mirror workplace collaboration to contribute to professional development; and build a toolkit for exercising agency and creativity as researchers, writers, and designers.

This article discusses a newly created method of UX journey mapping---User Experience as Racial Storytelling (UXRS)---designed to centralize Black user narratives in design thinking, and the teaching implications as a Black woman non-tenure track (NTT) online technical and professional communication (TPC) instructor. Revisiting an assigned group activity in a synchronous online technical writing course for engineers at a Predominantly White Institution (PWI), this essay will share pedagogical approaches of user experience as TPC pedagogy used to scaffold this method of racial storytelling as an anti-racist practice to adapt a social justice framework. This essay suggests UXRS can aid engineering students' perspective of inclusive design.

This experience report describes a fully online graduate course on user-centered design that was designed to scaffold self-regulated learning and then redesigned to follow Anaissie et al.'s 2021 iteration of the Liberatory Design process. The pivot to Liberatory Design helped strengthen the self-regulated learning scaffolding, as each phase of the Liberatory Design process includes the processes of noticing, reflecting, and seeing the system. This article describes the prompts incorporated into major assignments, student perceptions, lessons learned, and the ways that Liberatory Design and self-regulated learning prompting can be used throughout the user-centered design process to improve the work of designers.

In the introduction, we describe the exigence for the special issue and discuss how technical and professional communication (TPC) instructors teach user experience (UX) in ways that are unique, divergent, and innovative. Given the interdisciplinary nature of UX, sharing teaching stories as we do in this special issue demonstrates the multivocality of UX pedagogy and highlights the unique perspectives TPC instructors have to offer.

Over the course of my friendship with Dr. Halcyon Lawrence, I would often spend weekday evenings completing a mundane chore like washing dishes or feeding the cat. I would then hear my phone's alert for an incoming text message: "I need company. Are you working tonight?" Within 30 minutes or so Halcyon and I were on Zoom, cameras off, and nothing displayed on screen but our login names. Other times I'd receive a text like "I need your advice. Do you have time?" and we convened over the phone. When we talked, answers to our mutual question "How was your day?" prompted stories, and those stories led to musings and reflections. When I became befuddled when an assignment would flop or disappointed by a flat discussion, Halcyon gently queried, "So what were you trying to do?" or "Why do you think that activity didn't go well?" Her responses always reoriented me. When venting was no longer productive, we teased apart the problem, speculating what skill or knowledge students needed but had not sufficiently developed. These conversations often gave me enthusiasm for a new pedagogical approach or revealed insights about the gaps in our teaching and our students' learning. In the months since Halcyon's passing, I miss most acutely these nightly conversations about what was happening in our classrooms. My goal in this essay is to underscore the fact that part of Halcyon's legacy as a social justice-oriented technical communication scholar is her ethos as a teacher and collaborator who cared capaciously about student learning and the development of teaching practices and assignments.

Eli Goldblatt and David A. Jolliffe's 2020 Literacy as Conversation: Learning Networks in Urban and Rural Communities is to be interpreted as a "book of essays" and, more importantly, as vivid and lived conversations that aim to showcase nearly three decades of friendship between two colleagues concerned about meaningful community participation and literacy. This collection captures their reflections on their participation in community-based projects within the urban neighborhoods of Philadelphia and rural and semirural towns of Arkansas, but also offers an expanded and active understanding of literacy as social practice with complex relationships between sponsors, learning networks, power, and taking place in non-school environments having an access point through conversation and written symbols. Goldblatt and Jolliffe's endeavor to highlight the social connections and complexity of literacy aligns with their intent to include not just scholars in higher education, but also "everyday folk" or ordinary people including educators, government officials and policy makers, and people from all walks of life. As a scholar of color and teacher of a Hispanic-serving institution and as a community member of a predominantly Hispanic city in Texas, I was immediately intrigued and captured by the authors' commitment to highlight the stories of people who persevere and design interventions to construct hope and shape themselves and the world into a better place.

Teaching writing involves helping students develop as critical communicators who use writing to question often-unseen systems of power enabled by infrastructures, including digital spaces and technologies. This article uses Walton, Moore, and Jones' (2019) 3Ps Framework---positionality, privilege, and power---to explore how, through assignments we developed incorporating the Fabric of Digital Life digital archive, instructors can make visible to students the invisible layers of infrastructure. Using the 3Ps framework, we illustrate how our pedagogical approach encourages students to use writing to interrogate digital infrastructure and the ways it is entangled with positionality, privilege, and power.

Literacy and Pedagogy in an Age of Misinformation And Disinformation (2021) joins ongoing engagement with the topics of post-truth rhetorics (Carillo, 2018; McComiskey 2017; McIntyre 2018), evolving technologies in composition (Laquintano and Vee, 2017; Craig, 2017), and literacies pedagogies for our current moment (Colton and Holmes, 2018; Vee, 2017). Stemming from renewed interest in fake news after the 2016 election, the effects of the Trump presidency and its impacts in literacy education are represented throughout. This collection of 18 essays edited by Literacy in Composition (LiCS) journal editors Tara Lockhart, Brenda Glascott, Chris Warnick, Juli Parrish, and Justin Lewis continues the work of their 2017 special issue, "Literacy, Democracy, and Fake News." By bringing together "a range of perspectives---from literacy professionals in higher education, K-12, journalism, information technology, and other fields" (p. 2), the collection models a central condition for teaching within this context: to combat misinformation and disinformation, it is necessary to take a collaborative, interdisciplinary approach that expands outside of academic settings and brings together a wide range of expertise. Supporting this goal, the collection features six interviews moderated by Tara Lockhart. Each interview engages with a professional and/or educational staff, including social media strategists/curators/editors and curriculum/program coordinators, to explore how misinformation and disinformation is affecting all of us. Thus, Literacy and Pedagogy in an Age Of Misinformation and Disinformation "creates a polyphonous interrogation" (p. 6) to open up spaces and "opportunities for different kinds of literacy workers to hear and learn from each other---a networked approach that echoes the patterns of information ecologies themselves" (p. 6). Readers are invited to engage with the collection through "four essential threats that emerge most urgently from the collection's contributions" (p. 8). These include: 1) keywords and definitions; 2) contextualized praxis and pedagogy; 3) rhetorical analysis; and 4) "citizenship and civic literacies" (p. 13) based on people's different positionalities relating to misinformation and disinformation---as students, professors, journalists, social media specialists, etc. However, as readers will find, other organic pathways emerge based on format (curricular/course design, interviews, etc.) and context (higher education, K-12, online environments, etc.). Ultimately, it is within this complex web that we find a sustained engagement with practical and tangible strategies, pedagogies, and processes to think critically about how we combat misinformation and disinformation inside and outside of the classroom.

In this teaching experience report, we describe a research experience for undergraduates (REUs) designed to cognitively support the work of two student research assistants (RAs) from a two-year college (2YC) on a funded project that involved analyzing user-generated content for an mHealth app. First, we suggest partnerships between two- and four-year institutions as a move toward REU equity because students from 2YCs are not typically afforded these opportunities. We then review the role of research in undergraduate learning and posit the importance of scaffolding to sequence cognitive leaps. Finally, we present the cognitive scaffolding we created and connect it to our hybrid card sorting-affinity diagramming content analysis method.

As the field of technical and professional communication (TPC) has moved toward more inclusive perspectives, the use of decolonial frameworks has increased rapidly. However, TPC scholarship designed using decolonial frameworks lacks a clear, centralized definition and may overgeneralize and/or marginalize Indigenous concerns. Using a corpus analysis of TPC texts, we assess the ways that the field uses "decolonial" and propose a centralized definition of "decolonial" that focuses on rematriation of Indigenous land and knowledges. Further, we offer a heuristic that aids scholars in communication design appropriate for decolonial research and teaching strategies.

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).

No abstract available.

No abstract available.

This study examined how three successful entrepreneurs/investors assessed the visual rhetoric of actual pitch decks from novice entrepreneurs. We compare their evaluations to the result of a heuristic for assessing visual rhetoric, Color CRAYONTIP. While the pitch deck is recognized as a key artifact in entrepreneurship, no studies have specifically addressed the visual design of the deck nor the key design skills novice entrepreneurs should implement to effectively persuade potential investors of the idea's promise. This preliminary and exploratory case study begins a dialogue on this topic by performing a visual analysis of seven novice decks which were deemed successful by experienced angel investors. The analysis revealed five key skills that appear to account for the success of these decks with the reviewers: rhetorical awareness, typography, color, photography, and contrast.

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.

Building from previous work by Lauren and Schreiber (2017) and research individually conducted by the author (Lauren, 2018), this brief teaching case provides a rationale for coursework in project management that draws from experiential learning to teach facilitation. The case begins by providing a research context for how communication designers are increasingly focused on practices of facilitation in their work, particularly in fast-paced, distributed work environments. The case presents two metaphors (gardening and cooking) for helping students think about facilitation techniques. Then, the article describes a project management course that emphasizes the importance of facilitation in classroom exercises and major assignments by developing skills in three foundational areas: improvisation, document design, and systems design. Each area is described with examples to help instructors of project management adapt or use similar approaches at their own unique institutional, programmatic, and classroom contexts. The article concludes with four suggestions, such as partnering with industry practitioners and arranging site visits to see project management in action. As well, the concluding suggestions explain recent iterations of the course's design.

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 explores whether amateur Web designs would deter Web users from engaging with a business after viewing a wWebsite---and if their expectations and value judgments are influenced by business size and scope. This topic is important to small business owners, practitioners, and educators because credibility judgments by Web visitors may be quick and detrimental to a small business if they do not yield a positive response and subsequent engagement with the small business. This study provides an opportunity to broaden our understanding of Web visitor credibility judgments about small businesses and introduces a new thread to the discussion about alignment of consumer expectations, Web design teaching, industry best practices, and the shaping of universal values as they relate to the rhetoric of the Internet.

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.

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."

research-article Share on To what extent should we re-examine our teaching? Author: David Hailey Utah State University Utah State UniversityView Profile Authors Info & Claims Communication Design QuarterlyVolume 3Issue 2February 2015 pp 13–19https://doi.org/10.1145/2752853.2752855Published:27 March 2015Publication History 0citation15DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations0Total Downloads15Last 12 Months1Last 6 weeks1 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

Our poster is an exploration of the effects of quantifying physical experiences and refashioning them into new, interactive, live experiences through data visualization; the poster explores how data visualizations are designed to teach and effect change. Specifically, the authors explore two topics: athletic training and teacher training. Both of these fields have been inundated by data analysis tactics; sports data visualizations are highly developed and hypermediate while teacher training data are still largely immediate and static Through an analysis of these two topics in relation to theories of phenomenography and remediation, the poster discusses how the use of real-time data analysis and data visualization common in sports training might inform how that we effect change in other fields, such as teaching.

As I prepare to teach the latest iteration of my course in Visualizing Information, I am struck by how quickly visualization software and techniques are advancing. As an academic, whose primary job is as a researcher and teacher, my relationship with technology is rooted at the crossroads of excitement and dread; of just catching up and being perpetually behind. I feel excitement that advancements in web functionality and design, visualization techniques, and other technology-enabled practices are finally happening and can benefit my work and the work of my students. Conversely I am filled with dread that I rarely feel fully in-the-know, much less at the bleeding edge of these developments because my job doesn't necessarily reward that kind of knowledge. As a graduate student in the fall of 2000 (Is that really 14 years ago?) I earned a webmaster certification and followed that by helping in the redesign of several websites at my university. A decade later, as an assistant professor on the tenure clock, I was composing an academic webtext and I found myself needing the help of an undergraduate student to teach me how to integrate something called jQuery into my HTML5. I was dismayed over how rusty my skills had become once my tenure responsibilities had taken over.

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).