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This paper questions the ubiquitous practice of supplying minimalist information to users, of making that information functional only, of assuming that the Shannon-Weaver communication model should govern online systems, and of ignoring the social implications of such a stance. Help systems that provide fast, temporary solutions without providing a...
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... Much of the answer is discussed by Johnson-Eilola [7]. He is concerned most directly with training and documentation aspects of computer systems, but he also applies his ideas to the philosophical underpinnings of user interface design as well. ...
... Johnson-Eilola [7] goes on to discuss the aspects of the politics of amnesia that cause these effects as they are expressed in documentation and user interfaces. He notes that the most important technologies that human beings use are the most invisible and used without thought: "It's hard to argue with something that's not there. ...
... is telescoping of complexity leads into the second component of the denial of the receiver/user's agency produced by a Shannonistic model. Once again, to put it in Johnson-Eilola's pithy wording [7], "real learning disappears in the collapse of time. " Johnson-Eilola emphasizes the difference between learning and being trained. ...
Usability engineering is situated in a much larger social and institutional context than is usually acknowledged by usability professionals in the way that they define their field. The definitions and processes used in the improvement of user interfaces are subordinate to interests that often have narrow goals, having adverse effects on user awareness and autonomy that have further adverse effects on society as a whole. These effects are brought about by the way that knowledge about systems is limited by the design of the interface that limits the user to tasks and goals defined by organizations, often commercial ones. It is the point at which the structures of the user interface are defined by usability professionals that sources of the limitation of knowledge can be identified. These sources are defined by their reliance on a construction of the user's wants and needs that cyclically reinforce, through the actual use of the interface, the user's own construction of her wants and needs. To alleviate this, it is necessary to come up with new processes of user interface design that do not make assumptions about the user that tend to subordinate the user, and it is also necessary to reconstruct the user as a participant in the interface. NOTE: This article was written in 2003 as a final project for a Master's course in human-computer interaction at the University of Ottawa. The author attempted to publish it at the time, but did not really understand the process. The ideas stand up fairly well, however, and he would like to contribute it as a comment on the current state of affairs. It is only lightly edited for format.
... It will be a class of small (or small-ish) automated analytic functions assigned to do tasks that are incredibly tedious, repetitive, distributed in space (and perhaps time). This will be a new class of "little machines" (Johnson-Eilola, 2001) driven by logic but put to work for explicitly rhetorical purposes. Robots. ...
At the 2011 Computers and Writing Conference, Town Hall speakers were asked to envision the future. This piece extends that conversation, with contributors presenting a range of ideas, often looking backward at our history before gazing into their crystal balls to envision what the future might bring. The pieces included here discuss writing, teaching writing, writing assessment, publishing, robotics, mobility, and other aspects of the field loosely termed computers and composition as it was, is, or may come to be in what we hope will be only the start of an ongoing composition.
... The complexity of information technology (desktop applications, large-scale web sites, mobile computing devices, etc.) necessitates the development of help or user assistance systems to support users [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. Since the early days of user interfaces, help systems have been at the forefront of the technical writing, software development, and human-computer interaction fields. ...
Melody Y. Ivory, Andrew P. Martin, Rodrick Megraw, and Beverly Slabosky, Helping Users to Use Online Resources to Resolve Information Technology Problems: An Opportunity for the Semantic Web, Technical Report IS-TR-2005-08-02, Information School, University of Washington, August 26, 2005. Users need help systems to support their use of complex information technology (IT); however, several studies have shown help systems to be inadequate. To identify ways in which to improve help systems, we administered an online questionnaire to 107 IT users from diverse populations. The questionnaire probed users’ current perceptions and use of help systems that are within software applications, web sites, and mobile devices. A major finding was that two-thirds of users reported that they use web-based content to help them to resolve IT problems; use of web-based content superseded their use of printed and electronic documentation and their communication with technical support specialists and other people. Our study also revealed accessibility issues with online questionnaire systems; we describe specific problems and how we addressed them. Based on our findings, we propose the development of a portal system to harvest help content from various sources, organize intelligently the content, and enable users to search or browse for help on specific IT problems. We consider the system to be an ideal application for the Semantic Web and advocate research and industry collaboration to develop the necessary infrastructure. National Science Foundation (IIS-0414385)
Research problem: Content strategy, whether narrowly focused on the production of web-based materials for customers or managing the data, information, and documentation of an entire enterprise, has become the latest in a series of movements and methods that have sought to improve the integration of professional and technical communication with the marketing, training, and business processes of organizations. Research questions: How is content strategy defined and described in professional and scholarly literature? What do these definitions and descriptions suggest about the direction of the field of professional and technical communication? Literature review: The theoretical foundation of this study is Classical Rhetorical theory which, for thousands of years, has provided critical methods and vocabularies for the analysis of discourse; my purpose in using it here is to rely on a consistent lens that has served professional and technical communicators well. Classical rhetorical principles can give us useful insight into content strategy, the latest in a series of movements that have captured the attention of professional and technical communicators because they have promised to expand the scope of the work and move the work from the fringes of organizational activity to the center. Previous movements include knowledge management, single sourcing, and content management. Methodology: Because content strategy is an emerging area, I conducted an integrative literature review to characterize this emerging field. This involved a systematic search of peer-reviewed and professional literature on content strategy that met specific qualifications, reading and collecting information from each source about its answers to the research question and its authorship, and analyzing those data to find patterns in them. Results and conclusions: Because only two peer-reviewed sources existed on content strategy, the majority of the literature reviewed emerged from the trade press. I survey the definitions of content and content strategy provided by this literature, and found that almost every definition uses content as part of the definition, leading to some lack of clarity in all of those definitions. But three areas of consensus exist among the definitions: that content strategy is: (a) more inclusive of the lifecycle of content (addressing the processes of creating, revising, approving, publishing, and revising material), (b) integrated with technical and business requirements, and (c) largely focused on material used by customers and, therefore, focused on marketing and support documents. It primarily focuses on traditional genres of content and overlooks emerging genres. The literature suggests that content strategy provides a pathway to make the work of technical communicators more central to organizations. But the literature offers only broad advice for doing so, with few examples (other than some specific templates, which primarily benefit those who already have experience with content strategy). The advice primarily comes from authors working in consulting firms and, as a result, might not reflect the challenges that professional and technical communicators who work internally experience.
According to Ben McCorkle, the rhetorical canon of delivery-traditionally seen as the aspect of oratory pertaining to vocal tone, inflection, and physical gesture-has undergone a period of renewal within the last few decades to include the array of typefaces, color palettes, graphics, and other design elements used to convey a message to a chosen audience. McCorkle posits that this redefinition, while a noteworthy moment of modern rhetorical theory, is just the latest instance in a historical pattern of interaction between rhetoric and technology. In Rhetorical Delivery as Technological Discourse: A Cross-Historical Study, McCorkle explores the symbiotic relationship between delivery and technologies of writing and communication. Aiming to enhance historical understanding by demonstrating how changes in writing technology have altered our conception of delivery, McCorkle reveals the ways in which oratory and the tools of written expression have directly affected one another throughout the ages. To make his argument, the author examines case studies from significant historical moments in the Western rhetorical tradition. Beginning with the ancient Greeks, McCorkle illustrates how the increasingly literate Greeks developed rhetorical theories intended for oratory that incorporated "writerly" tendencies, diminishing delivery's once-prime status in the process. Also explored is the near-eradication of rhetorical delivery in the mid-fifteenth century-the period of transition from late manuscript to early print culture-and the implications of the burgeoning print culture during the nineteenth century. McCorkle then investigates the declining interest in delivery as technology designed to replace the human voice and gesture became prominent at the beginning of the 1900s. Situating scholarship on delivery within a broader postmodern structure, he moves on to a discussion of the characteristics of contemporary hypertextual and digital communication and its role in reviving the canon, while also anticipating the future of communication technologies, the likely shifts in attitude toward delivery, and the implications of both on the future of teaching rhetoric. Rhetorical Delivery as Technological Discourse traces a long-view perspective of rhetorical history to present readers a productive reading of the volatile treatment of delivery alongside the parallel history of writing and communication technologies. This rereading will expand knowledge of the canon by not only offering the most thorough treatment of the history of rhetorical delivery available but also inviting conversation about the reciprocal impacts of rhetorical theory and written communication on each other throughout this history. Copyright © 2012 by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University. All rights reserved.
"What any body is-and is able to do-cannot be disentangled from the media we use to consume and produce texts." -from the Introduction. Kristin Arola and Anne Wysocki argue that composing in new media is composing the body-is embodiment. In Composing (Media) = Composing (Embodiment), they have brought together a powerful set of essays that agree on the need for compositionists-and their students-to engage with a wide range of new media texts. These chapters explore how texts of all varieties mediate and thereby contribute to the human experiences of communication, of self, the body, and composing. Sample assignments and activities exemplify how this exploration might proceed in the writing classroom. Contributors here articulate ways to understand how writing enables the experience of our bodies as selves, and at the same time to see the work of (our) writing in mediating selves to make them accessible to institutional perceptions and constraints. These writers argue that what a body does, and can do, cannot be disentangled from the media we use, nor from the times and cultures and technologies with which we engage. To the discipline of composition, this is an important discussion because it clarifies the impact/s of literacy on citizens, freedoms, and societies. To the classroom, it is important because it helps compositionists to support their students as they enact, learn, and reflect upon their own embodied and embodying writing. © 2012 by the University Press of Colorado. All rights reserved.
We describe our recent efforts to generate and use case studies to teach communication skills in software development. We believe our work is innovative in several respects. The case studies touch on rhetorical issues that are crucial to software development yet not commonly associated with the field of software engineering. Moreover, they present students with complex, problematic situations, rather than sanitized post hoc interpretations often associated with case study assignments. The case study project is an interdisciplinary collaboration that interweaves the expertise of software engineers and technical communicators. Our software engineering and technical communication curricula have been enhanced through this cross-fertilization.
As a cognitive framework for making meaning of the world, the narrative provides a powerful form for structuring information, and has been adopted as a useful design framework for many communicative forms, including interactive media. This paper reports on the use of visual narrative for user-testing an interactive museum show. The viewers perceived narratives of a sequence of graphics from a show on brain science were compared to the designers intended narrative. Mapping the audiences reading of the visual arguments proved a useful testing structure in developing the show, with color and pattern tracking proving especially critical when viewers experienced novel or abstract information.
There are a number of security-critical applications such as personal firewalls, web browsers and e-mail clients, whose users have little or no security knowledge and are easily confused, even frustrated by menus, messages or dialog boxes that deal with security issues. While there are evaluations of existing applications and proposals for new approaches or design guidelines for usable security applications, little effort has been invested in determining how applications can help users in security decisions and security tasks. The purpose of this work is to analyse conventional and security-specific user help techniques with regard to their usefulness in supporting lay users in security applications. We analyse the following help techniques: online documentation, context-sensitive help, wizards, assistants, safe staging and social navigation, and complement these with the tempting alternative of built-in, hidden security. Criteria for the analysis are derived from the type of user questions that can arise in applications and from definitions of when a security application can be called usable. Designers of security applications can use our analysis as general recommendations for when and how to use and combine user help techniques in security applications, but they can also use the analysis as a template. They can instantiate the template for their specific application to arrive at a concrete analysis of which user help techniques are most suitable in their specific case.
