User Experience and Technical Communication: Beyond Intertwining

Introduction

It has been over 10 years since Ginny Redish, first alone (2010) and then later with Carol Barnum (2011), wrote two essays describing the relationship between Technical Communication and User Experience. These pieces are frequently cited and provide evidence that the fields of UX and TC cannot be separated due to their overlapping and intertwined history and shared characteristics. In this special issue, we wish to revisit observations, concerns, and projects from Redish and Barnum alongside arguments that position TC as providing a necessary ethical component to usability and UX (Dilger, 2006; Still & Albers, 2010). Given the legacy of this influence, we wish to revisit Redish's predictions and her cautions to preview the contributions in this special issue.

Predictions: Collaboration, Communication, Complexity and Change

Redish predicted that technical communication would continue to make key contributions to UX in four categories: collaboration, communication, complexity and change. Looking back over the past decade, we see evidence that shows technical communication scholars making contributions in these areas and deepening our understanding about the relationship between the two fields. Technical communication scholars have been studying how technical communication can support collaboration (e.g., Walton et al., 2016) as well as studying the ways concepts of collaboration, leadership, management, and project management have been problematically collapsed, affecting how work is valued (Lauren & Schreiber, 2018). Redish notes one of the important elements TC brings to collaboration is advocacy and Natasha Jones (2016) notably and explicitly positions technical communication as advocacy, “promoting a more genuine and critical interrogation of how our work impacts the human experience” (p. 349).

In addition, there has been a sustained interest in technical communication on designing for complexity (Albers & Mazur, 2014) as well as a broadening focus that signals the growth, change, and focus on the strands of TC and UX that overlap with other areas. Examples of contributions that forge new connections between UX and TC include, designing for the patient experience (Melonçon, 2017), health technology design (Green, 2020), designing with and for communities (Rose et al., 2017; Shivers-Mcnair & San Diego 2017; Simmons & Zoetewey, 2012), language, translation, and multilingual user experience (Cardinal et al., 2020; Gonzales, 2018), international and global UX (St.Amant, 2016; Sun, 2012; Sun & Getto, 2017), accessibility (Oswal, 2019) and design thinking (Tham, 2021).

Where Redish positions advocacy as technical communication's role in collaboration, we see it emerging as throughline across all four categories. The social justice turn in technical communication (Walton et al., 2019) directs our attention to see how design, technology, and the field of UX need to be interrogated to resist harm. Dorpenyo's (2019) study of biometric election technology reaffirms that products and technologies are non-neutral. At the same time, he expressly bridges TC localization research and social justice research with a shared UX concern. Sano-Franchini (2017) presents a culturally reflexive framework for UX that is to foreground the complexity of culture in order to “open up conversations about the social and material consequences of design, and to encourage UX designers to be increasingly deliberate with their strategies of representation, keeping issues of race and culture in mind” (p.42).

Cautions: Continuing to Intertwine or an Unraveling

As UX and technical communication continue to be intertwined both inside and outside the academy, it becomes increasingly important to foreground these connections in our pedagogies, programs, and research. Scholarly contributions and industry opportunities certainly suggest the promise of the continued overlap between TC and UX (Brumerger & Lauer, 2015; Lauer & Brumberger, 2016), but there is also emerging evidence that cultivating these connections may be waning. For example, in a content analysis of the scholarly literature from the technical communication journals from 1996–2017, Boettger & Friess found that articles on usability/UX appeared far less than expected, leading them to conjecture that the study results suggest “that technical communication journals have largely ceded the study of this topic (UX)” (Boettger & Friess, 2020, p.18). In addition, Clegg et al. (2020), reviewed programmatic outcomes in undergraduate technical and professional communication programs and found that less than 3% explicitly focused on user experience, usability, or user-centered design. This trend runs counter to several voices calling for more focus, discussion, and opportunities for teaching usability and UX in TC programs (Chong, 2012; Chong, 2016; Getto & Beecher, 2016).

In “Technical Communication and Usability: Intertwined Strands and Mutual Influences,” Ginny Redish notes that while several academic fields are recognized for their early and continued influence for usability specialists, Technical Communication as a field has not been recognized (p. 194). Looking to the future, Redish predicted that technical communication would continue to make contributions and she cautioned that mutual respect among those involved in UX work is essential if the profession is to thrive (p. 196). That mutual respect includes an interdisciplinary history that includes important and substantial contributions from technical communication as an academic discipline and as an industry profession. It also means valuing both academic and industry knowledge and perspectives and strengthening the connections between the two.

As we reflect on the past and current connections between TC and UX, it is important to recognize the value TPC and UX bring to each other. The articles in this collection illustrate a move into new spaces, incorporating new methods and forging new connections, to provide us an opportunity to conceptualize the continuously evolving relationship between the fields.

A Preview of the Articles in This Special Issue

Our interest in the evolving and complex relationship between UX and TC led us to plan this special issue. The three articles offer unique contributions and help us see the relationships in a new light.

In the article, “User Experience Methods in Research and Practice,” Candice Lanius, Joy Robinson, and Ryan Weber, chart current UX methods through a study that combines a literature review and a survey of UX practitioners across industry and academia. This study helps to show trends within UX methods and also provides a more robust understanding of what methods are in current use, the trends, and what attributes influence the choice of researchers’ UX methods. The study echoes findings by Boettger and Friess (2020) and concerns that the field of technical communication continues to struggle to establish itself as a central component of UX.

In the article “User Experience in Health & Medicine: Building Methods for Patient Experience Design in Multidisciplinary Collaborations,” Molly Kessler and her co-authors advocate and extend the concept of patient experience design (PXD). Their entry is notable in that it focuses on an important and emerging area for UX design, that of designing for and with patients and in health contexts. They re-calibrate traditional usability study methods for PXD and focus on the value of recruiting patients and the benefits and challenges of multidisciplinary collaboration.

In the article “Cognition, Care, and Usability: Applying Cognitive Concepts to User Experience Design in Health and Medical Contexts,” Kirk St.Amant emphasizes the importance of the setting to performing healthcare activities. He argues for a script theory approach to help create mental models to explicitly connect space and activities in a context of use, creating a framework that acknowledges the complex context of healthcare. The framework helps identify variables affecting usability in healthcare situations to give technical communicators a way to design and develop healthcare materials that meet users' needs.

Envisioning the Future Relationships Between TC & UX

The intertwining that Redish and Barnum characterized ten years ago was informed by a myriad of factors: intentional connections in a small but growing field, a proliferation of technology used by more people in more contexts, and also happenstance and serendipity. Now that UX has matured and grown into its own field with methods, trajectories, and communities, it is helpful for technical communication scholars and practitioners to ask: how would we like to build this relationship into the future? Shall we acquiesce to the other fields who also overlap with UX, or does technical communication – with its unique focus and concerns on advocacy, people, communication, and social justice – need to re-position ourselves moving forward.

We hope to ask this question as a way to call the TC community to think about it. What does it mean for our academic programs, our scholarly work, and for the documents, systems, and structures we help design in practice?