IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication Sep 2005

Connecting Usability Education and Research With Industry Needs and Practices

L. Cooke ; S. Mings Microsoft (United States)

Abstract

Ideally, academic research should inform workplace practices and workplace practices should inform academic research and education. However, as many researchers have noted, a gap often exists between academia and industry. This article begins to bridge that gap by reporting the results of a small-scale study at Microsoft in which 12 individuals were interviewed about their views on usability education and research. This study addressed two questions: (1) What knowledge, skills, and abilities should technical communication teachers stress in teaching usability and (2) how can academic research in usability benefit practitioners? The results indicate that usability education needs to be expanded to include additional usability evaluation methods and that students need strong critical assessment and communication skills when they enter the workplace. The results also reveal that usability research in the areas of return-on-investment, online help, and cognition would be of great use to practitioners.

Journal
IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication
Published
2005-09-01
DOI
10.1109/tpc.2005.853938
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Closed
Topics
teacher development assessment technical communication
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Citation Context

Cited by in this index (4)

  1. Cosgrove (2023)
    Finding the Gap: A Comparison of UX Industry Practices and UX Course Outcomes i…
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  2. Chong (2018)
    Implementing Usability Testing in Introductory Technical Communication Service …
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  3. Getto et al. (2016)
    Toward a Model of UX Education: Training UX Designers Within the Academy
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  4. Lee (2011)
    Using the Dialogic Communication Model to Teach Students to Write a Report Intr…
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    IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication
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CrossRef global citation count: 19 View in citation network → Build reading path →

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