Telemedicine has been shown to be an effective means of managing follow-up care in chronic diseases such as depression. Exactly why telemedicine calls work, however, remains largely unknown because there are no adequate research tools to describe the complex communicative interactions in these encounters. We report here an ongoing project to investigate the efficacy of telemedicine in depression care, arguing that technical communication specialists have unique contributions to make to this kind of research.

In visual querying, users analyze data for their decisions and problems by interacting with graphics that are dynamic and linked. This querying paradigm is new, a dramatic break from the more familiar retrieving of data via search statements and displaying of it in static charts and graphs. For this new visual querying paradigm, analysts conceptually and operationally need to master new approaches. To discover salient relationships, they need to manipulate displays. To drill down for detail or causes, they have to select data of interest directly from a graph. And to draw inferences, they have to consider meanings across several dynamically linked graphics. With the aim of studying users' success in these new approaches, particularly focusing on the approach of directly selecting data from graphs, I conducted a scenario-based usability test with 10 data analysts. They interacted with visualizations to complete a realistic complex analysis—evaluating employee performance. Test findings reveal a range of difficulties in visual selection that, at times, gave rise to inaccurate selections, invalid conclusions, and misguided decisions. To overcome these difficulties, support for visual selection needs to be built into interfaces and help. Results and recommended improvements are presented.

We designed and piloted a technical communication course for software engineering majors to take concurrently with their capstone project course in software design. In the pilot, one third of the capstone design course students jointly enrolled in the writing class. One goal of the collaborative courses was to use writing to improve the usability of students’ software. We studied the effects of writing on students’ user‐centered beliefs and design practices and on the usability of their product, using surveys, document analyses, expert reviews, and user test results. When possible, we compared the usability processes and products of teams who did and did not take the writing class. Our findings suggest that the synergy of this interdisciplinary approach effectively sensitized students to user‐centered design, instilled in them a commitment to it, and helped them develop usable products.

This inquiry explores the practical implications of constructivist theory for documentation that is targeted to complex tasks and experienced users (users who are less than experts but more than novices). It argues that current task-oriented documentation falls short in addressing these tasks and users and examines the contributions that constructivism can make, contributions that will lead to documentation that differs in kind not just degree from conventional task-oriented manuals and help systems. This inquiry synthesizes the following four themes from constructivist theory and analyzes their relevance to documentation development: (1) changing the object of instruction to “activity in context,” (2) shaping instruction around problems experienced by users in work contexts, (3) highlighting users' social stock of knowledge, and (4) adopting a rhetoric of problem-based instruction expressed through cases. Examples are given from current efforts in interface and instructional design that writers may adapt to documentation design.

Nostalgic Angels: Rearticulating Hypertext Writing. Johndan Johnson‐Eilola. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1997. 272 pages. Persuasion and Privacy in Cyberspace: The Online Protests over Lotus Marketplace and the Clipper Chip. Laura J. Gurak. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1997. 181 pages. Fundable Knowledge: The Marketing of Defense Technology. A. D. Van Nostrand. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1997. 241 pages. Rhetoric and Pedagogy, Its History, Philosophy, and Practice: Essays in Honor of James J. Murphy. Ed. Winifred Bryan Horner and Michael Leff. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995. 337 pages. Of Problematology: Philosophy, Science, and Language. Michel Meyer. Trans. David Jamison, in collaboration with Allan Hart. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. 310 pages.

Few, if any, studies on collaboration examine interactions between software manual writers and graphic designers. This study analyzes these collaborations, inquiring into the ways in which writers' and designers' processes of collaboration directly affect the form and substance of a finished manual. We argue that when these developers have dialogue, draft iteratively, and jointly make decisions, they produce manuals that could not possibly be developed through linear, assembly-line collaborative processes. We characterize three possible models of collaboration—assembly line (linear drafting), swap meet (iterative drafting and joint problem solving), and symphony (codevelopment in every aspect)—and use as a case study our own collaboration in developing a manual, detailing the concerns that writers and designers bring to a manual project. Analyzing our collaboration as an example of a swap-meet model, we examine four design problems that we faced and explain the ways in which our collaborative processes uniquely shaped our solutions to these problems.

Humanistic Aspects of Technical Communication. Ed. Paul M. Dombrowski. Amityville, NY: Baywood, 1994. 239 pp. Part of Baywood's Technical Communication Series, Jay R. Gould, ed. Composition Theory for the Postmodern Classroom. Ed. Gary A. Olson and Sidney I. Dobrin. Albany: State University of New York. 1994. 360 pp. Publications Management: Essays for Professional Communicators. Ed. O. Jane Allen and Lynn H. Deming. Amityville, NY: Baywood, 1994. 251 pp. Designing and Writing Online Documentation: Hypermedia for Self‐Supporting Products, 2nd ed. William Horton. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1994. 439 pp. with index. On‐the‐Job Learning in the Software Industry: Corporate Culture and the Acquisition of Knowledge. Marc Sacks. Westport, CT: Quorum Books, 1994. 216 pp.

Signs, Genres, and Communities in Technical Communication. M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Michael K. Gilbertson. Amityville: Baywood, 1992. 272 pp. Sociomedia: Multimedia, Hypermedia, and the Social Construction of Knowledge. Ed. Edward Barrett. Cambridge: MIT P, 1992. 580 pp. On Line Help: Design and Evaluation. Thomas M. Duffy, James E. Palmer, and Brad Mehlenbacher. Norwood: Ablex, 1992. 260 pp. The Professional Writer: A Guide for Advanced Technical Writing. Gerald J. Aired, Walter E. Oliu, and Charles T. Brusaw. New York: St. Martin's P, 1992. 426 pp. Techniques for Technical Communicators. Ed. Carol Barnum and Saul Carliner New York: Macmillan 1993. 368 pp.

When writers communicate risks about hazardous technologies, they need to realize that their persuasive purposes cannot be to resolve debate but rather to evoke consensus and to encourage new ways of talking about risk issues. To gain insight into achieving such purposes, rhetoricians can learn from theories in the social science subdisciplines of risk perception and communication. Theorists in these fields identify various psychological, social, political, and cultural dynamics that risk communicators must address in order to generate new processes of debate. I apply many of these theoretical principles to a sample risk communication on nuclear energy to determine realistic expectations for persuasive risk communications. My conclusions stress that rhetorical researchers need to explore and test the extent to which written rhetorical forms can facilitate consensus.

The Development of Scientific Thinking Skills. Deanna Kuhn, Eric Amsel, and Michael O'Loughlin, Academic Press, 1988. 249 pp. Understanding the Representational Mind, Josef Perner, MIT Press, 1991. 348 pp. Literacy as Involvement: The Acts of Writers and Readers, and Texts. Deborah Brandt. Carbondaie: Southern Illinois, 1990. 159 pp. Dialogue, Dialectic, and Conversation: A Social Perspective on the Function of Writing. Gregory Clark. Carbondale: Southern Illinois, 1990. 93 pp. Hypermedia and Literary Studies. Ed. Paul Delany and George P. Landow. Cambridge: MIT P, 1991. 352 pp. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Jay David Bolter. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991. 258 pp. Also from Erlbaum, Writing Space: A Hypertext for Macintosh. Writing and Speaking in Business. Gretchen N. Vik, Clyde W. Wilkinson, and Dorothy C. Wilkinson. 10th ed. Homewood: Irwin, 1990. 636 pp. Communication for Management and Business. Norman B. Sigband and Arthur H. Bell. 5th ed. Glenview: Scott, 1989. 783 pp. Business Communication Today. Courtland L. Bovee and John V. Thill. 2nd ed. New York: Random, 1989. 680 pp. Guidelines for Preparing Proposals: A Manual on How to Organize Winning Proposals. Roy Meador. Chelsea: Lewis, 1985. 116 pp.

In analyzing audiences for software manuals, documentation developers need to move past a strictly cognitive vision of users' needs and examine the social and organizational factors that influence task performance and instructional needs. In order to discover the ways in which social and organizational factors affect users' tasks and their acquisition of knowledge and skills, I conducted a survey of 25 people who use databases at work. All survey respondents use database programs as tools for conducting job tasks that involve complex analyses and reporting of data. I examined the relationship between people's technical proficiency and task complexity and their job roles, professional responsibilities, flexibility in work arrangements and modes of workplace learning. Findings show that learning to use databases for complex tasks in work contexts entails more than merely learning concepts and procedures for executing program functions. Users need to learn ways of manipulating a program, integrating and combining its functions in inventive ways to serve the purposes of various types of job tasks and to support professional approaches to these tasks.

Software documentation is a growing field in technical writing, yet no synthesis of current research exists to bring together findings on content, form, and the invoked relationship between reader and writer. Without such an overview writers are apt to follow discrete, context-free prescriptions instead of guiding principles that account for the multidimensional functions of language in the communication act of a user's manual. This article reviews findings from research in cognitive processing and text linguistics to derive such a set of principles. It then assesses a widely-used wordprocessing manual against these principles to find that the writers manipulate form (the textual function of language) to achieve comprehension better than they do content (the ideational function) or reader-writer relationships (the interpersonal function). However, comprehension is stymied without equal attention paid to ideational and interpersonal strategies.

A current assumption is that “one best system” can be devised to develop and test user documentation. In-house documentation, however, demands approaches that do not fit into a generic system. Specifically, an in-house manual needs a special type of usability testing, one that measures if and how a manual is used to meet the goals of its organization. Along with quality testing, in-house writers must also run studies on how their manuals actually function in the workplace. This article describes a three-pronged design for actual use testing: user logs; observations; and surveys. In my case study, this testing revealed that users did not use their manuals for reasons other than quality — for instance, reliance on social interactions for acquiring information. My findings show that writing an effective manual requires more than composing skills; it demands writers' involvement in the organizational dynamics that motivate workers to use or not use their manuals.