The Lumosity games and subsequent “memory wars” illustrate the rhetorical power of statistics in public discourse. Defenders of Lumosity build upon discursive traces based in societal fears and arguments based in “science” supported through statistics and experimentation. Detractors of Lumosity argue that their experiments are faulty. A close rhetorical reading reveals that certain commonalities exist across defenders and detractors alike. Looking at the inventional strategies of the statistical analyst as rhetor demonstrates how statistical tools are granted agency to determine research outcomes. Displacement of rhetorical agency has ramifications for understanding popular scientific discourse and making decisions as a society.

User experience (UX) researchers in technical communication (TC) and beyond still need a clear picture of the methods used to measure and evaluate UX. This article charts current UX methods through a systematic literature review of recent publications (2016–2018) and a survey of 52 UX practitioners in academia and industry. Our results indicate that contemporary UX research favors mixed methods, and that usability testing is especially popular in both published research and our survey results. This article presents these findings as a snapshot of contemporary research methods for UX.