The hybrid exchange project described here aims to facilitate intercultural learning and cultural awareness by promoting meaningful virtual and cultural interactions among students from universities in Kenya, Ireland, and Germany. We collected qualitative data from former participants, who engaged in virtual and in-person exchanges. Our study indicates that hybrid exchange programs effectively promote intercultural understanding, and personal and professional development in technical communication. The program's design, which includes structured activities and social exchanges, contributed to the successful achievement of these goals. Such approaches can serve as a model for improving virtual team dynamics in various sectors, applicable beyond educational contexts.

Video games are forms of multimodal technical communication, conveying complicated information about game goals, mechanics, game physics, and more, to the player in a way that usually feels integrated into the game itself. This article highlights ways that games use interaction to convey information to players, classifying the communicative elements in several popular games into C.S. Pierce's classes of sign (decoratives, indicatives, and informatives). This paper asserts that technical communicators can take cues from video games to design technical communication products that better meet contemporary users’ expectations of agency and interaction—allowing them to explore and discover on their own.

This study revisits Sam Dragga’s research on ethical decision-making in document design, updating it to reflect contemporary concerns. Our findings indicate that participants today perceive the document design scenarios as significantly more unethical than those in Dragga's original study, with heightened attention to accessibility, cultural sensitivity, and social justice. While Dragga's study emphasized concerns over the consequences of document design choices, our results suggest a shift in focus toward the writer's intent. Participants frequently judged deliberate manipulation as unethical, even in cases where no direct harm was evident. These findings highlight the evolving ethical priorities in technical communication and underscore the need for practitioners and educators to reassess and revise the field's guiding principles to align with contemporary values of inclusivity and social responsibility.

Community health practitioners face a common challenge of communicating the value of their work because it is intentionally designed to prevent health issues from happening. This case study examines how impact storytelling—a four-question framework developed by a community health manager at a nonprofit health system—mediates between technical expertise and executive's understanding. Through interviews with four Community Health practitioners, this research explains how the framework addresses specific technical communication challenges. This research brings together theory with practice by offering both a transferable framework for nonprofit organizations as well as theoretical insights into how workplace communication tools emerge from workplace practices.

This article examines a multi-year study of a client-based, critical service-learning project embedded in a Professional Writing course at a Jesuit Catholic university. Drawing on surveys and interviews with students across six course sections, the study explores how students perceived service learning, which aspects of the project most shaped their learning, and how the university's mission informed their understanding of service and professionalism. Findings reveal that while students often entered the course with conventional assumptions about service as charity and professionalism as formality, many came to adopt a more relational, justice-oriented view of professional communication. By engaging with real clients—many of whom face structural inequities—students encountered the human realities behind workplace writing and began to see professionalism as a flexible, context-responsive ethic grounded in care and reciprocity. This article proposes the concept of justice-oriented professionalism as a reimagined model for technical and professional communication, one aligned with critical pedagogy, social justice, and relational responsiveness.

This paper reports on a user experience (UX) study investigating how college students navigate university-sponsored online systems for sharing chosen name and pronouns. While the opportunity to share gender identity ostensibly enables inclusive and usable systems for queer students, the visibility of gender nonconformity also imposes surveillance concerns, as pronouns have become an organizing tool for governments and university boards intent on limiting diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Drawing from trans and queer scholarship, this article suggests that the concept of visibility should be closely scrutinized in design settings where heightened visibility can present risks to bodily autonomy or safety.

This article demonstrates how biometric technologies operate through security logics, and how technical communicators can resist the process of securitization through what we refer to as “opt-out logics.” We question security logics through a case example of public-facing documentation from the Transportation Security Administration on the use of biometric technologies for domestic travel at airports across the United States. Our analysis focuses on three security logics: improving efficiency, mitigating risk, and paternalistic concern for passenger experience. To consider how these logics structure encounters, both authors provide personal narratives of their experience with biometric technologies in airports. Finally, drawing from tactical technical communication, we offer opt-out logics as modes of resistance in three categories: documentation, pedagogy, and design. We argue tactics of resistance are ways technical communicators can engage in resisting the expectation to opt in to systems.

This article examines United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID's) maternal health (MH) success stories as transnational assemblages that deploy security logics to justify external governance while appearing to celebrate local agency. Through rhetorical-cultural analysis of 25 narratives, I identify three recurring strategies—crisis amplification, representational homogenization, and paratextual techniques—that frame MH as requiring urgent intervention. These stories obscure local expertise and align care with donor-defined metrics and narrative arcs. Findings show that security logics circulate through genre conventions and design templates that normalize intervention as technical and humanitarian. I argue TPC scholars must examine assemblage mechanisms’ role in shaping representation, risk, and care transnationally.

Cookies, or small packets of data sent between programs, have become synonymous with the opaque practices for collecting, storing, and commodifying user-generated data. Convoluted language and misleading design practices impede user understanding and agency over the security of their data, including its collection, use, and storage. This article provides a brief history of cookies, presents concerns related to how websites inform users of the presence of cookies and their choices in how they are used, and introduces heuristics that align with technical and professional communication best practices for crafting user-centered cookie banners.

This article examines how technical communicators, specifically concerned with the overlap between design, community, and security logics, can better understand how certain ideals around security, surveillance and safety can reinforce or resist narratives about state-sponsored protections. We use the public and political controversy surrounding the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center (Cop City) as a backdrop for engaging the questions regarding technical communicators potential for intervening into unjust security logics that impact the environment and marginalized communities.

Storytelling is a key component of user experience (UX) design practice. However, while storytelling is universally acknowledged as important, what exactly is meant by storytelling is elastic. This elasticity makes it hard to explain and teach to emerging practitioners. In this research paper, we propose a data-derived definition to bring more understanding to the concept of storytelling in UX. The contribution of this work is a multifaceted definition of storytelling in UX that can be used as a heuristic to help make it more meaningful and understandable to students and early career professionals. We conclude by providing strategies to incorporate the storytelling heuristic into UX pedagogy.

This study investigates how chronic pain is represented in widely used pain assessment scales. Through a thematic analysis, four overarching themes are identified: pain is framed as a linear continuum, depicted as a progressive bodily obstacle, normalized to a baseline of zero, and characterized as a predictable condition. The design of these scales oversimplifies the complexities of chronic pain into a linear narrative that can potentially marginalize patient experiences and lead to treatment delays. This research advocates for a shift toward patient experience design (PXD) to develop more nuanced, human-centered assessment tools that better capture the fluidity of chronicity.

This study explores technical and professional communication (TPC) students’ design of multimodal career portfolios, focusing on their strategies amid technological advancements and shifting workplace dynamics. The study analyzed 155 artifacts from 31 students, including resumes, video resumes, cover letters, LinkedIn profiles, and rhetorical and modal analyses, using MAXQDA for discourse analysis. The results highlight the importance of research synthesis, intertextuality, audience awareness, personal branding, and adaptability in portfolio development. TPC students effectively create portfolios that meet company expectations across boundaries. A multimodal approach in TPC curricula is recommended, along with further research on emerging technologies’ impact on portfolios.

Simplified user interfaces (SUIs) refer to a new design technique in technical communication that simplifies screenshots by removing irrelevant elements and highlighting only the essential information. While there is consensus on the benefits of signaling in multimedia learning, there is currently no empirical evidence on the effects of SUIs on user performance. This study reports an eye-tracking experiment that examined whether users can work more effectively and efficiently with a software tutorial containing SUIs instead of unedited pictures without signaling or pictures using conventional signaling techniques. The study also aimed to clarify whether SUIs draw user attention to relevant areas of a picture. Eye tracking and performance measures indicate that SUIs draw user attention successfully, but do not improve user performance compared to unedited screenshot in a tutorial scenario. The results contribute to the question of whether design principles of multimedia learning can be successfully transferred to action-oriented texts.

Drawing on rhetorical genre studies, we explore research article abstracts created by generative artificial intelligence (AI). These synthetic genres—genre-ing activities shaped by the recursive nature of language learning models in AI-driven text generation—are of interest as they could influence informational quality, leading to various forms of disordered information such as misinformation. We conduct a two-part study generating abstracts about (a) genre scholarship and (b) polarized topics subject to misinformation. We conclude with considerations about this speculative domain of AI text generation and dis/misinformation spread and how genre approaches may be instructive in its identification.

We ask, “What genre conventions are shared in 18th- and 21st-century midwifery manuals?” The article responds to this question by situating manuals as cultural arbiters and defining genre in a cultural context. The article identifies parallels between 18th-century and 21st-century midwifery manuals that focus on the rhetorical situation (via front matter, including title pages and prefaces) and accessibility of information (via design, definitions, and step-by-step procedures). Midwifery practices have changed drastically in the modern era, but the underlying goals—safety and health for the birthing person and child—remain constant. Increased publication of manuals dedicated to midwifery in the 18th century suggests a heightened focus on practices leading to successful outcomes in childbirth that highlight the value of examining manuals as a genre reflecting humanistic elements in technical documents. We argue that midwifery manuals emphasize underlying ideologies in the production and reproduction of socio-cultural consciousness still present today.

While user experience (UX) and technical and professional communication (TPC) are intertwined, how UX is taught in TPC is highly variable. In this article, we report data from a study with TPC instructors who teach UX to identify patterns in approaches to teaching UX. We provide background on UX pedagogy, share methods including collecting data from a questionnaire and interviews and conducting qualitative analysis. The findings map teaching activities onto the design process and show patterns and commonalities. We conclude by proposing a process-based approach for teaching UX in TPC classes and programs to provide scaffolding and connections for students.

Previous literature has shown that generative artificial intelligence (GAI) software, including large language model (LLM) chatbots, might contribute to qualitative research studies. However, there is still a need to examine the relationships between researchers, GAI technologies, data, and findings. To address this need, our team conducted a thematic analysis of our reflexive journals from an LLM chatbot-assisted research project. We identified four roles that researchers adopted: managers closely monitored the LLM's work, teachers instructed the LLM on theories and methods, colleagues openly discussed the data with the LLM, and advocates worked with the LLM to improve user experiences. Planning for and playing with multiple roles also helped to enrich the research process. This study underscores the potential for using conversational roles as a framework to support reflexivity when working with GAI technologies on qualitative research.

The use of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) large language models has increased in both professional and classroom technical writing settings. One common response to student use of GAI is to increase surveillance, incorporating plagiarism detection services or banning certain composing activities from the classroom. This paper argues such measures are harmful and instead proposes a “CARE” framework: critical, authorial, rhetorical, and educational—a nuanced approach emphasizing ethical and contextual AI use in technical writing classrooms. This framework aligns with plagiarism best practices, initially devised from when rhetoric and composition scholars considered the pedagogical implications of the Internet.

This article offers a content analysis of technical and professional communication articles related to user experience (TPC-UX) published between 2013 and 2022 in six TPC scholarly journals. This analysis reveals that TPC-UX primarily focuses on product and process topics and illustrates the terminological comingling of user experience and usability. Specific TPC-UX topics identified include theory, multimodality, health and medicine, localization, web design, mobile applications, accessibility, and content strategy. These topics suggest that TPC-UX's key affordances are its attunement to networked power dynamics, its theoretically rich treatment of multimodality, and its strategies for navigating contextual complexities.

The cognitive theory of multimedia learning (CTML) describes a set of empirically tested principles that technical and professional communication research largely acknowledges as important to the design of presentation slides. However, presenters often run into difficulties understanding how to apply CTML principles to contexts in which it has not been tested. We present three pilot studies that extend our knowledge of how to apply CTML principles. Pilot study one suggests that CTML principles can be effective for presenting advanced research to expert audiences. Pilot study two highlights the importance of user testing nonessential images added primarily for visual interest, specifically finding that visual organizer images such as Microsoft PowerPoint's SmartArt, can backfire by unintentionally indicating imprecise relationships while adding little in terms of visual interest. Pilot study three suggests that, when needing to present a long quotation, presenters should avoid verbatim reading and consider abridging or paraphrasing the quotation.

The usability of items is connected to cognition, or how the brain processes information. Many of the related processes occur subconsciously and are guided by the mental models individuals have created based on their experiences. The better communication professional and communication students understand such dynamics, the more effectively they can create usable content for an audience. This article presents an approach, the Actualization, Recognition, Categorization, Operationalization (ARCO) method, for identifying the mental models that influence usability expectations. Individuals can use the results of this process to create content that better addresses an audience’s usability expectations.

The rise of English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) threatens to upend traditional teaching and learning practices. Writing, speaking, and communication instruction will all need to evolve. This article presents a case study of one institution's efforts to design and implement a communication curriculum responsive to the unique demands of the EMI environment. The curriculum proposed enacts an interdisciplinary, multimodal approach to the teaching of communication. We discuss the specifics of the curriculum, the process of its creation, the principles underlying it, and how these principles play out in practice. In doing so, we hope to provide a model both for global communication instruction and future curricular design efforts.

We use a continuous improvement model to evaluate an information design assignment by analyzing 120 student drafts and finals alongside instructor feedback. Using data from across sections ( N = 118), we illustrate a process focused on improving student learning that other technical and professional communication program administrators and faculty can follow, while also offering insights into ways programs can assist a contingent labor force with improving pedagogical practice. This study provides insights into assignment design through data-driven evidence and reflective work that is necessary to help continuously improve a service course and to assist students in meeting learning outcomes.

Forms and surveys often require address information, including state. State data entry fields in online forms typically use a dropdown where the user selects one state from the list. A review of online forms shows a variety of state lists used, with some including the state name fully spelled out while others use the state abbreviation, and still others use a combination of the two, like MD-Maryland. Through a series of three independent experiments, we investigate usability of state list designs as measured by time-on-task, accuracy of answers, or user preference. Results indicate that participants have difficulty with state abbreviations alone. That design results in longer time-on-task, and lower accuracy and preference, particularly for states where the user does not live. We did not find any significant difference in usability for full state names compared to the abbreviation and state name combination in a dropdown design.

Creating new emojis is predicated on a system of technical writing that lobbies for new emojis to the Unicode Consortium. Emojination, an activist collective working for cultural inclusivity, helps everyday people write proposals for inclusive and culturally sensitive emojis. Through a case study of Emojination, this article describes ways that Tactical Technical Communication can work toward cultural inclusivity within regulatory frameworks.

Using the technical and professional communication service course as the site for research, and student learning outcomes (SLOs) as the specific focus, we gathered, coded, and analyzed 503 SLOs from 93 institutions. Our results show the top outcomes are rhetoric, genre, writing, design, and collaboration. We discuss these outcomes and then we offer programmatic implications drawn from the data that encourage technical and professional communication program administrators and faculty to use common SLOs, to improve outcome development, and to reconsider the purpose of the service course for students.

Using first-hand experience supplemented by an open-access archive, this article examines case examples of civically engaged, public-facing technical communication (e.g., training for community organizers) as well as the value of stories and storytelling for content strategy. By developing 10 best practices for content strategy in advocacy organizations, this article offers suggestions for how to design and sustain content strategy for community organizers and contributes to the field's knowledge of the content strategy of politically engaged nonprofits, particularly those with a strong digital presence.

This study examines the content strategies of 12 Chinese universities’ international websites. Going beyond the Hofstede–Hall model, we explore a novel mixed-method study using both content strategy analysis and user research to investigate intercultural web-based communication strategies. Our study identifies the impacts of Chinese cultural and socio-political values on web content and the mismatch between such values and the information needs of globally distributed prospective students. We conclude that universities’ web content strategies should fully understand target audiences’ needs. Designers benefit from doing stakeholder interviews and competitor analysis to provide relevant, accurate, and accessible information to users from different cultures.

This article describes a graduate seminar on Content Strategy taught in the Fall of 2020 during the height of the COVID pandemic. Students worked totally online with a real client to develop a content strategy plan. This class was noteworthy because, unlike most classes that end up designing a logo, identity package, and look-n-feel approach to content strategy, this course ended up focusing on the much-overlooked emphasis on governance in an already well-established content strategy plan. Students conducted a persona research study (using Redish's approach) and built a UX journey map (using Kalbach's approach). They conducted a content audit (using Halverson's approach) and then used the data to determine what problems in content development really needed to be solved. These analyses showed that the client's principal needs actually dealt with governance issues rather than logos, branding, and content, so students researched and recommended suitable governance systems (primarily following Welchman's approach). Finally, they produced templates, sample content, and a content development plan for PCLS based on the new governance model provided.

While technical communication consultants and researchers agree that content strategy requires attention to both customer needs and business goals, we found no evidence that technical communication educators promote an accurate understanding of business goals among their content strategy students. Through industry–academia collaboration, we integrate two existing models, using content tactics within organizational characteristics that define the maturity level of an organization's content operations. Analyzing the current state of maturity for each characteristic highlights gaps that can define a content strategy with prioritized tactics and, ultimately, encourages the growth of technical communicator leadership and the empowerment of our profession.

Age gates are becoming common on the websites of cannabis dispensaries, following design practices in other controversial industries. Yet, age gates can typically be bypassed through trial and error or basic arithmetic, raising questions over best practices. This study therefore characterized the age gates of dispensaries licensed in the Arizona adult use cannabis program, using a “digital mystery shopper” approach to examine the age gates’ location, appearance, and performance. After presenting the results, I outline possible best practices and next steps for technical and professional communicators.

Relying on rhetorical analysis, this article explores the rhetoric and ethics of a particular type of designer- and player-created technical communication genre, video patch notes, to further explore how various technical communication genres structure the experience of play. By providing a case study of official video patch notes for the game Overwatch in combination with Youtube user dinoflask's satirical fan made videos, the article examines both developers’ communication practices and the ways in which players creatively negotiate and re-purpose these practices in order to illustrate how such tactical technical communication remixes sustain a subtle dialogue between players and developers. This dialogue in particular illuminates pain points between stakeholders (in this case, discrepancies between developer intent and player experience) in ways that could potentially offer a means of persuading particularly ideologically fixed audiences, highlighting how practitioners might use tactical technical communication with activist intent.

The American Psychological Association notes that approximately one in seven women will experience postpartum depression (PPD) after giving birth. Finding support can help lead to better outcomes for those suffering from PPD. This article examines cover photos of PPD support groups on Facebook. By arguing that these photos construct rhetorical boundaries that support-seekers must cross to access PPD resources, the article expands our current understandings of rhetorical boundaries and calls for increased attention to visual selection in high-stakes health contexts. This article emphasizes the idea that we might transform visual boundaries, like the Facebook cover photos studied here, into rhetorical boundary objects that promote inclusivity through more thoughtful and representative image selection.

Telemedicine is an alternative healthcare delivery system whereby patients access digital technology to consult with a physician virtually. Patients first interact with telemedicine via a consumer-facing website. Telemedicine promises numerous benefits to patients, such as increased access to healthcare, yet poor usability of the telemedicine user interface (UI) may hinder patient acceptance and adoption of the service. The telemedicine UI moderates patients’ ability to utilize telemedicine, and therefore it must be usable, but it must also be rhetorical to motivate patients to perform certain actions. Digital rhetoric refers to UI elements that influence user actions and knowledge and is tied to usability because of these same human–computer interaction (HCI) factors. This study examined the usability of three telemedicine provider UIs and by identifying usability problems, reveals digital rhetoric that is significant to telemedicine UIs. The article concludes by offering heuristics of digital rhetoric that lead to optimal usability.

This study examines the role of multimodality in facilitating service-learning goals. We report findings from qualitative interviews with 20 college instructors who have designed and facilitated multimodal community-engaged learning projects, identifying their motivations, goals, and the impact of these projects through reflections. Based on our qualitative analysis of these instructor responses, we discuss the technological and pedagogical implications of multimodal social advocacy projects in technical and professional writing courses.

In technical and professional communication, the social justice turn calls on us to interrogate sites of positionality, privilege, and power to help foreground strategies that can empower marginalized groups. I propose that mainstream media coverage of the opioid epidemic represents such a site because addiction to these drugs, which initially primarily affected White people, has been positioned as a public health issue rather than a criminal justice problem. I explore the strategies that were used to create this positioning by investigating themes in the visual rhetoric as conveyed through data visualizations and in the text of the articles in which these graphics were published. My results align with two previous studies that confirmed this public health framing. I also observed an emphasis on mortality, which contributes to our understanding of rhetorical strategies that can be used to engender support rather than condemnation for those suffering from drug addiction.

The architecture of Texas A&M University at Qatar (TAMUQ), set up under Her Highness Sheikha Moza Al-Misnedd and the Qatar Foundation, spatially embodies new possibilities because AIA Gold Medal award-winning architect Ricardo Legorreta designed buildings that both challenge and encompass Gulf Arabian tradition. The buildings exemplify, enact, and embody new ways of experiencing gendered educational identity that also honors traditional local values. This architecture is important because TAMUQ is a U.S. institution that serves several different international student populations. This article emphasizes how TAMUQ functions as a heterotopia, one which creates embodied experiences of gender, education, and identity and requires what Rogoff termed “a curious eye” to discern how these educational spaces reflect changing identities in the Gulf states.

This paper suggests adding a social justice framework to the questions that Kostelnick suggests to help students investigate culture in “Seeing Difference.” Using visual rhetoric to teach technical communication is beneficial for students; however, problematic representations of culture may unintentionally appear in visual design and are easy to overlook. Using a social justice framework that promotes a contextual study of culture should allow technical communication instructors to prepare students to investigate the social and political aspects of culture. This paper, therefore, revisits “Seeing Difference” and asks that technical communication instructors guide students to research sociopolitical aspects of culture and visuals to develop designs that are interculturally appropriate.

This study analyzes the visualization of census data in the U.S. Statistical Atlases from 1874 to 1925. I examine how visual strategies were used to construct an American identity by contrasting the “native” population with the “other”—new immigrants and African Americans, which were visualized as undesirable counterparts. By defining the “other,” the Atlases created a pan ethnic identity of the “native white” population, established a racial hierarchy, and hardened the division between old and new immigrants. The study develops a rhetorical framework for understanding how data design is used to marginalize racially and ethnically minority groups.

This article examines visuals used in the reporting of the 2015-2016 Zika virus outbreak in order to explore the use of different image forms and genres in communicating health information to distinct audiences. By tracing an informational report through several publication types, the use of different image forms and rhetorical genres are observed, as is the robustness and flexibility of these categorizations.

This article follows up on the conversation about new streams of approaches in technical communication and user experience (UX) design, i.e., design thinking, content strategy, and artificial intelligence (AI), which afford implications for professional practice. By extending such implications to technical communication pedagogy, we aim to demonstrate the importance of paying attention to these streams in our programmatic development and provide strategies for doing so.

Though the remote internship is certainly not a new phenomenon, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the growth of this model for undergraduate experiential learning. As we consider this shift, we must evaluate how to best assist students completing remote internships. In this article, we argue that infrastructure offers a useful framework for understanding students’ internship experience and corresponding professionalization. We present two case studies of student remote internship experiences, analyzing areas of challenge and success through the infrastructural areas of writing projects, communication, and logistics. We offer recommendations for faculty working with remote student interns to promote positive learning experiences.

Fierce competition has made innovation increasingly necessary for business success, and this has increased the importance of user-based innovation strategies like design thinking (DT). While many studies in technical and professional communication (TPC) have explored how DT can be used pedagogically, no studies have done this through investigating how DT is used as a workplace composing process. This study does exactly that. First, it presents the current state of research on pedagogical uses of DT in TPC, and then it builds upon those suggestions with an empirical study that chronicles on how two web design firms use DT to make websites. My main suggestion is to teach DT as a recursive process that allows students transcend potentially incorrect assumptions built into design tasks through gathering data not only from users, but from clients as well.

The virtual museum tour has claimed new audiences during the pandemic, but not all virtual tours are created equal. First, this paper will explore the world of virtual museums and UX scholarship. Secondly, the paper will propose a viable set of options in determining effectiveness of virtual museums. Thirdly, the paper will discuss specific examples of UX design among museum virtual exhibits offered currently, specifically those that do not require any additional downloads or software. Finally, the paper intends to discuss the implications of high quality UX design within the realm of virtual museum tour.

Teaching and composing with multimedia humanizes online technical writing and communication classes. However, students do not always see the connection between multimedia instructional materials, multimedia assignments, and the course learning outcomes. Purposeful pedagogy-driven course design uses multimedia instructional materials to connect assignments, course materials, and assessments with course outcomes. Technical writing instructors can integrate synchronous and asynchronous multimedia elements to address not only the what and why of online technical writing instruction but also the how of multimedia instructional materials. Example multimedia instructional materials and student projects discussed in the article can increase student retention and promote engaged learning.