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.

Most research on writing has focussed on the work of single authors working by hand on prose texts. However, much professional work is collaborative, computer-based, not exclusively prose, and not well studied. Some preliminary research suggests that the use of computers will affect the cognitive activities of individual authors in several domains of immediate relevance to composition and technical communication practitioners: planning activities, editing activities, the writing of novice computer users or poor typists, and writing for electronic mail and other electronic communication. Research reported here suggests that the rapidly increasing capability of computer-based writing systems will force communication researchers to 1) broaden their basic conception of and methods of studying “author” to include authoring teams, 2) broaden the type of material studied from that which is purely or largely textual to that which much more frequently includes other types of information, and 3) track changes in “genre conventions” resulting from the increased capabilities of computer-based systems—in short, to assess the impacts of the medium on the message.