This study is a comprehensive census of the homepage design practices of Fortune 500 companies, analyzing 46 elements of homepage design. The analysis establishes recent design trends of Fortune 500 homepages. In addition, it provides a snapshot of recent homepage design practices of the Fortune 500 that can be used for comparison with other populations and for future research and longitudinal studies of web design.

Development projects in information and communication technologies may fail if local users perceive them as incompatible with existing work practices or cultural values. The present study examines cultural communication in the design of a prototype information-management system for the social service department of a developing Caribbean nation. The requirements-engineering process required communication within a culturally heterogeneous group of local and outside stakeholders. A capacity-building writing workshop sought to integrate the database into workplace practices. The experience highlights professional communication's role in mediating cultural difference and facilitating stakeholders' self-determination in the improvement of their work practices.

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Individual and work characteristics are used in telecommuting plans; however, their impact on telecommuting success is not well known. We studied how employee tenure, work experience, communication skills, task interdependence, work output measurability, and task variety impact telecommuter productivity, performance, and satisfaction after taking into account the impact of communication technologies. Data collected from 89 North American telecommuters suggest that in addition to the richness of the media, work experience, communication skills, and task interdependence impact telecommuting success. These characteristics are practically identifiable and measurable; therefore, we expect our findings to help managers convert increasing telecommuting adoption rates to well-defined and measurable gains.

Technology use and adaptation are the center of attention in research on virtual teams. Through empirical observations from six interpretative cases of virtual teams, we suggest conceptualizing the relationship between technology-use practices and collaborative practices as a technology-alignment process. We define technology alignment based upon four key perspectives on technology-use practices: continuous iterative process, reflection-on-action activities, malleability and reconfigurability, and transformation. Moreover, we show how these four key perspectives influence the design, the outcome, the task processes, and the socioemotional processes of the particular virtual team.

This index covers all technical items - papers, correspondence, reviews, etc. - that appeared in this periodical during the year, and items from previous years that were commented upon or corrected in this year. Departments and other items may also be covered if they have been judged to have archival value. The Author Index contains the primary entry for each item, listed under the first author's name. The primary entry includes the coauthors' names, the title of the paper or other item, and its location, specified by the publication abbreviation, year, month, and inclusive pagination. The Subject Index contains entries describing the item under all appropriate subject headings, plus the first author's name, the publication abbreviation, month, and year, and inclusive pages. Note that the item title is found only under the primary entry in the Author Index.

What factors seem to cause miscommunication in international virtual workplaces? The research reported here seeks to respond to this question with a multicase study of 22 employees from three different types of international organizations. Interview data indicate that participants in this study emphasized the practical, day-to-day challenges of virtual workplaces; few of them had given thought to broader theories that might account for challenges-theories that are often presented in the literature of computer-mediated communication (CMC). In addition, participants in this study emphasized different factors than did CMC literature as most significant to causing miscommunication in international virtual workplaces.

In light of what has taken place since their presentation at the IEEE International Professional Communication Conference in 2005, the authors describe additional requirements and merits of matching technical writing students in the US with translation students in Europe in a collaborative assignment. Where the original article dealt with how to set up and organize the collaboration, this tutorial delves into the pedagogical challenges and the process dynamics involved in such an exchange, including mediation, power, and teamwork issues.

In this book, Miriam F. Williams explores regulatory writing that promotes distrust in historical and contemporary African American constituencies. Focusing specifically on Texas regulatory laws, she examines how writers of legislation and policies struggle with making language of legislation and policies clearer and objective while grappling with long-held feelings of distrust of government legislation in African American citizens--feelings that have been perpetuated by historical use of veiled language in laws and policies. She explores the possibility of mitigation an audience's mistrust by writing these policies in Plain English in an attempt to be more objective and transparent. The book is recommended to all who seek to explore the connections between public policy and technical communication and the implications of these fields of study on social and cultural concerns.

This three-phased study examines corporate blog use, specifically the impact and value of blogs on organizational social capital and knowledge sharing at Dell Inc., a global computer manufacturer. The impact of social-mediated Web 2.0 technologies on organizational social capital has received limited attention in scholarship, possibly because of the inevident connection to measurable economic value and newness of the technology. Our findings indicate the corporate blog can be used as a sustainable forum leading to a shared understanding of organizational roles, increased sense of group cohesiveness, improved work processes, and improved professional and personal ties among employees in the organization.

Communication skills are key to the workforce success of engineering graduates. The Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) Workforce Communication Program at Georgia Tech has successfully incorporated executive panel interaction into its capstone design course to align student skills with executive expectations. The objectives of the panel are to raise student awareness about the importance of communication to workforce success and to gain knowledge about communication skills directly from executives. Executives interact directly with students about workforce communication, career advancement, and the communication skills they consider most critical. The process of assembling and holding a panel is described for potential implementation in other engineering programs.

This book offers a practitioner's perspective on using social media in developing, revising, and distributing technical documentation. It is targeted to professional communicators interested in applying tools such as blogs and wikis to elicit more user participation in the documentation development process. It would be an excellent addition to professional communication courses focused on preparing documentation and/or using new media. This book not only provides a solid overview of currently available tools, but it also helps give readers the confidence to begin exploring and participating in online conversations and communities of their own.

Why does a team member prefer some colleagues to others in information seeking? Past literature suggests that the physical accessibility of a knowledge source, the information quality of the source, and relational concerns influence such a choice. This study extends past literature by suggesting that formal structural factors are also important. Particularly, job interdependence, competition, and supervisory relationships are hypothesized to affect information-sourcing frequency. Our social-network analysis of an information systems project team indicates that formal structural factors are important to the development of informal networks and the perception of the information quality of a source. They have direct and indirect impacts on sourcing behavior. Implications for information systems project management are discussed.

Quantitative content analysis can enrich research in technical communication by identifying the frequency of thematic or rhetorical patterns and then exploring their relationship through inferential statistics. Over the last decade, the field has published few content analyses, and several of these applications have been qualitative, diluting the method's inherent rigor. This paper describes the versatility of quantitative content analysis and offers a broader application for its use in the field. This discussion frames two original case studies that illustrate the design variability that content analysis offers researchers.

s of research papers in IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication are available in languages other than English: Arabic, French, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Russian , and Spanish. You can find them on the journal's website, which is linked (under "Publications") to the website of the IEEE Professional Communication Society: http://www.ieeepcs.org .

This special section highlights the efforts of technical communicators to innovate new approaches for postmodern usability. Redish provides an invaluable historical overview of where we have been, and she also addresses where we might be headed as technical communicators engaged in shaping usability studies. Cooke presents a mixed-methods approach for data analysis, leaning on a mixture of eye tracking and concurrent think-aloud protocol. Finally, Kase, Zhang, Carroll, and Rosson offer a pattern-based approach as an alternative method for investigating sustainable strategies of information-technology learning.

Using a within-subjects field experiment, we tested the differences between paper-based and electronic employee surveys. Employees of a large organization were invited to respond to a paper survey as well as an identical electronic survey. Results from 134 employees who completed both questionnaires indicated that electronic surveys were seen as marginally easier to use and more enjoyable than paper surveys. However, the paper-based questionnaires produced a higher response rate. The self-reported likelihood that participants would respond to similar questionnaires in the future did not differ between the two formats. After comparing the answers on survey items that measured feelings of well-being and spending patterns, data quality also appeared to be equivalent across the two formats. Conceptual issues, as well as the implications for managers who are administering employee surveys, are discussed.

Technical communication and usability (user experience, or UX) have a long, intertwined history, dating back at least to the 1970s. The author, who has been active in both fields for the last three decades, gives many examples of how technical communicators have influenced UX practice and how usability specialists have influenced technical communication. The author also explores how technical communicators can continue to contribute to future UX theory, research, and practice through collaboration, through their communication skills, dealing with the reality of ever-increasing complexity in products and processes and dealing with the need to adapt to more rapid change.

This tutorial presents a workshop aimed at developing persuasive writing skills among lay practitioners with limited literacy who are required to write reports for professionals in a social-service delivery context. Drawing on Ong's distinction between the communication patterns of oral and literate culture, the workshop was designed to utilize participants' existing oral communication patterns as the underpinning for developing rhetorical strategies appropriate for their professional audience. The workshop consisted of a four-phase process of iterative questioning: identifying audience, defining project goals, formulating feasible outcomes, and assembling relevant evidence and support.

To better understand how individuals, groups, and organizations can use information systems more effectively, a research approach closer to the level of social interchange is required. A multiple-level, sustainable, information-technology (IT) learning framework, rooted in patterns of practice and constructed by participatory action research, offers an alternative methodology for investigating sustainable strategies of IT learning. The framework evolved from concrete instances of IT learning across organizational case studies. A patterns-based analysis of the ethnographic data enabled the examination of informal IT learning in community contexts and the identification of IT interventions more likely to produce successful learning outcomes.

This tutorial is the outgrowth of a corporate request for a website critique by undergraduate, Net-Generation (Net-Gen) students. Fifty-four sophomores working in teams of four and five in the College of Business at the University of Southern Indiana critiqued the website of Kimball International. The report resulted in high-quality criticism of the technology, a deep response to the affective qualities of the website, and recommendations that were accepted by the corporation. This tutorial offers recommendations for this style project's repetition using pedagogical techniques appropriate to the Net-Gen.

Distributed work is an increasingly common phenomenon in a number of technical and professional settings, and the complexity of this work requires high degrees of knowledge sharing and integration that move beyond assembly-line approaches to collaboration. Since participants in distributed-work settings rely almost exclusively on written and spoken language to mediate their collaborative relationships, professional communication faculty need educational approaches that empower students with language practices designed specifically to support effective teaming in these complex environments. To address this need, we employ discourse analysis and Speech Act Theory to identify these language practices in a case study of two cohorts of distributed, interdisciplinary, and cross-cultural student teams. The findings show correlations between language practices and successful collaboration. These correlations have significant implications for teaching and practice.

How might the rhetorical strategies of ethos, pathos, logos, and kairos play a mediational, intervening role in the successful administration of online surveys? What are the general costs and benefits of conducting survey research? Based on the activity of administering an online survey ( <i xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">N</i> = 334) testing knowledge and understanding of US copyright law among digital writers (both students and teachers) in US technical and professional writing (TPW) programs, I blend Rhetorical Theory with Activity Theory by conducting a rhetorical analysis within an Activity Theory paradigm. I posit that a rhetorically informed heuristic mediates between the researcher and potential participants when the researcher attempts to recruit individuals to respond to an online survey.

Organizations are using virtual communities to facilitate knowledge management and to enhance communication among employees, customers, and other interested individuals. Individual users can use virtual communities to engage in knowledge sharing. Professional communicators need to understand and adapt to a globalized and “flat” world, where people across different cultures interact freely and easily with one another in virtual communities. An intriguing question regarding virtual communities relates to whether national culture affects communication and types of knowledge sharing. This study examines the influence of US and Chinese national cultures on types of knowledge-sharing activities in virtual communities. The findings indicate that national culture differences between China and the US are also evident in virtual community environments.

Concurrent think-aloud protocol (CTA) is often used in usability test settings to gain insight into participants' thoughts during their task performances. This study adds to a growing body of research within technical communication that addresses the use of think-aloud protocols in usability test settings. The eye movements and verbalizations of 10 participants were recorded as they searched for information on a website. The analysis of transcripts and real-time eye movement showed that CTA is an accurate data-collection method. The researcher found that the majority of user verbalizations in the study included words, phrases, and sentences that users read from the screen. Silence and verbal fillers that occurred during CTA enabled users to assess and process information during their searches. This study demonstrates the value technical communicators add to the study of usability test methods, and the paper recommends future avenues of research.

s of research papers in IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication are available in languages other than English: Arabic, French, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Russian , and Spanish. You can find them on the journal's website, which is linked (under "Publications") to the website of the IEEE Professional Communication Society: http://www.ieeepcs.org .

This book is a well-written scholarly work that develops the concept of metaphor as a subject to be taught in technical and scientific communication. It develops the reader's understanding of the particular nature and role of metaphor in technical communication and should be useful as a reference book for educators.

Existing literature argues, in general terms, that China has a growing need for technical communication and technical communication education. Following up on these studies, this paper more closely examines China's needs for technical communication education. Based on interviews with industry professionals and reviews of their writing samples, this paper seeks to find out who among the industry professionals in China needs technical communication, what their communication practices are, the areas in which they need education, and what US technical communication professionals can do to help develop this education. Preliminary findings and suggestions as well as topics for future research are presented.

Coombs's work is a solid introduction to crisis communication that will serve technical communicators learning about the topic from a public-relations perspective. Heath and O'Hair's book provides a good integration of the related disciplines, and its contributors give readers a solid background in relevant theories and issues.