Emma J. Rose

University of Washington Tacoma | UW Tacoma · Faculty of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences

This panel addresses the question “How do we prepare undergraduate and graduate students for the future of communication design?” by assembling scholars/teachers who each share a pedagogical case of teaching UX. Across different institutions and programs, these cases reveal how process-based approaches to teaching UX adapt and support course design...

Storytelling is a key skill for technical communication and user experience students; however, storytelling is not typically explicitly taught in many programs and courses. In this experience report, we share details from a classroom activity that provides structure for teaching storytelling as part of a larger portfolio assignment to help prepare...

In the introduction, we describe the exigence for the special issue and discuss how technical and professional communication (TPC) instructors teach user experience (UX) in ways that are unique, divergent, and innovative. iven the interdisciplinary nature of UX, sharing teaching stories as we do in this special issue demonstrates the multivocality...

Drawing on our collective experience as educators and preliminary results of an in-progress research study, we explore the complexities of integrating storytelling into Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) education. Within the user experience (UX) industry, storytelling is considered essential for collaborating, engaging stakeholders, and shaping prof...

While user experience (UX) and technical and professional communication (TPC) are intertwined, how UX is taught in TPC is highly variable. In this article, we report data from a study with TPC instructors who teach UX to identify patterns in approaches to teaching UX. We provide background on UX pedagogy, share methods including collecting data fro...

The past two decades have seen a paradigm shift from the narrow conception of usability to the broader process of user experience. We argue that durable connections to usability remain in TPC. In this perspectives piece, we highlight the paradigm shift and share traces of how the usability paradigm remains durable, primarily in the service course....

In this article, we discuss the unique challenges of Community-Engaged User Experience (CEUX) by using storytelling and present a framework of emergent patterns (brown, 2017) to make visible labor, practice, and messiness of the process of building, maintaining, and renewing partnerships with community members and partners. We share three models fo...

This introductory dialogue invites readers to think with a range of scholars about the role of community engaged researchers in the field. It draws together a range of perspectives as way of honoring CER through both methodology and genre. The authors provide insight into their own experiences and draw attention to elements of CER that rarely get d...

While accessibility is acknowledged as a crucial component in design, many technologies remain inaccessible for people with disabilities. As part of a study to better understand UX practice to inform pedagogy, we analyzed 58 interview sessions that included 65 senior user experience (UX) professionals and asked them “How do you consider accessibili...

One of the most important emerging trends in the field of user experience (UX) is the creation and use of design systems, which are a collection of documented elements that embody an organization's design rules and principles. While design systems are becoming ubiquitous among organizations, especially those with mature design practices, few academ...

This panel extends the scope of user experience (UX) to be more inclusive of social and environmental justice aims by providing a series of diverse case studies that cover topics of community engagement, transnational research, technical communication pedagogy, content management systems, and environmental resilience and accentuating aspects of jus...

Although programs in TPC are well positioned to prepare students for careers in user experience (UX), teaching UX can be challenging due to its breadth and complexity. Despite these challenges, many TPC instructors teach UX with little support or training. To understand and improve how TPC instructors teach UX, this article considers the research q...

Usability testing is a key research method in human-computer interaction (HCI). When students are designing for others, usability testing is an opportunity to learn how the design is currently working and how it can be improved. This usability testing plan template gives individual students or teams a structure to help plan, conduct, and analyze da...

→The UX industry is complex to both practice in and teach about. →Through interviews with practitioners, we identified five challenges facing the field: misconceptions about UX, untested education models, added complexity, increased systematization, and ever-changing job roles. →To move forward, we need more dialogue between industry and academia

While being a good communicator is a key skill for user experience (UX) practitioners, human-computer interaction (HCI) education typically prioritizes the creation of tangible project deliverables, e.g., wireframes, over providing students with a more complete set of communication skills. In this paper, we draw from an analysis of 60 interviews wi...

In this special issue, we reflect on the past and current connections between TC and UX, it is important to recognize the value the two fields bring to one another. The articles in this collection illustrate a move into new spaces, incorporating new methods, and forging new connections and provide us an opportunity to conceptualize the continuously...

In this experience report, we describe the work of a coalition of community experts and academics who are collaborating to work towards language justice for communities who speak languages other than English in the Puget Sound region. To illustrate this effort, we describe our experience designing a customizable values statement through participato...

This experience report documents the impetus for, process, and result of a coalition of technical and professional communica- tion (TPC) scholars who crafted an anti-racist scholarly reviewing heuristic for editors, reviewers, and authors. In Summer 2020, a coalition of scholars met to respond to calls from Women of Color leaders in the field of TP...

As technical and professional communication (TPC) moves to a more explicit focus on social justice, many scholars see this shift but don’t nec- essarily see their work fitting in. Others who want to move in this direc- tion may not know where to start. And still others may want to reflect on past work to learn and look forward. In this chapter, we...

Designing portable, affordable, and effective medical devices for underserved areas and populations can improve access to healthcare and improve health outcomes when done well, but can also carry risks when not designed with contexts and constraints in mind. In this paper, we present a design research case study that illustrates how to use a cross-...

The field of user experience (UX) is growing and rapidly evolving. As instructors who teach in and help design UX programs for students in higher education, we are interested in developing compelling and relevant educational experiences for our students who aim to work as UX professionals. To gain a better understanding of the current expectations...

Teaching user experience (UX) is complex and challenging. UX is interdisciplinary and claimed by a variety of fields, Technical and Professional Communication being one. While many UX positions include skills and responsibilities that align with skills traditionally taught in technical communicator programs, not all programs have broadened to inclu...

In this research paper, we argue that designing communication for and with multilingual audiences requires a participatory approach to user experience (UX) design that uses language and translation activities to open up avenues for more inclusive participation. We contrast this approach to the extraction model of user experience that we see practic...

As social robots continue to show promise as assistive technologies, the exploration of appropriate and impactful robot behaviors is key to their eventual success. Teens are a unique population given their vulnerability to stress leading to both mental and physical illness. Much of teen stress stems from school, making the school environment an ide...

Today’s teens will most likely be the first generation to spend a lifetime living and interacting with both mechanical and social robots. Although human–robot interaction has been explored in children, adults, and seniors, examination of teen–robot interaction has been limited. In this paper, we provide evidence that teen–robot interaction is a uni...

Food insecurity is a growing problem on college campuses. By following a user-centered design process, our team envisioned how design can be a tool for enacting social justice. By posing the question "How might we support college students challenged by food insecurity?" we designed a product called the Food Locker that paired an online ordering sys...

While blogging has become a popular social tool, less work has focused on how blogging can be used as a tool for researchers to disseminate research findings to the public. In this experience report, we share how we created a research blog to disseminate information about a multi-year research project to develop a social robot that will be used in...

Design requirements can be gathered through a variety of ways; however, engaging teen audiences in design process can be challenging. We present a novel method for engaging teens in design through a social robot design challenge. Groups of teens participated in the challenge to prototype a social robot that would live in their high school and help...

Social robots are emerging as an important intervention for a variety of vulnerable populations. However, engaging participants in the design of social robots in a way that is ethical, meaningful, and rigorous can be challenging. Many current methods in human–robotic interaction rely on laboratory practices, often experimental, and many times invol...

Teens are a unique population with needs and communication styles that differ from adults and children. Methods in human-centered design were initially conceptualized with adults in mind, but these methods should be reexamined to include the needs of teens. In this experience report, we reflect on a project introducing teens to human-centered desig...

The primary assumption of human-centered design is that humans should be the focus of design and decision making when creating technology and information products. However, when certain types of people are consistently centered, others are intentionally or unintentionally pushed to the margins or left out altogether. In this panel, the speakers dis...

As technologies proliferate into all aspects of daily life, UX practitioners have the ability and responsibility to engage in research to help organizations better understand people’s needs. We argue that UX practitioners have an ethical commitment to deploy methods that consciously shift power to create a more equitable relationship between resear...

Today's teens will most likely be the first generation to spend a lifetime living and interacting with both mechanical and social robots. Although human-robot interaction has been explored in children, adults, and seniors, examination of teen-robot interaction has been minimal. Using human-centered design, our team is developing a social robot to g...

In this article, we present a reflection on the methodology and methods for a usability study conducted in partnership with a non-profit organization in Seattle, Washington in the United States. The organization is a community health center that provides health care services to medically underserved patients, including immigrant populations, regard...

Although personas are commonly used to represent users in design, their rhetorical function has been little explored. In this paper, we theorize personas’ rhetorical function as ventriloquization, where one person speaks with the voice of another. In ventriloquizing users through personas, practitioners speak for users, while scripting personas to...

While scholars in technical communication have examined on theoretical concerns of post humanism, less work has focused on designing for engaging experiences between humans and nonhuman agents like robots. In this research article, we present findings from a project investigating the possibility of designing a social robot to help measure teen stre...

Articles Expert yet vulnerable: Understanding the needs of transit dependent riders to inform policy and design Transportation is a crucial resource that links people to jobs, social networks, community and services. The transit dependent-those who do not own private vehicles-occupy a unique position. They are expert in their knowledge of public tr...

Teaching user experience (UX) can be challenging due to the situated, complex, and messy nature of the work. However, the complexity of UX in practice is often invisible to students learning these methods and practices for the fi rst time in class. In this article, we present fi ndings from a study of rhetorical strategies of UX practitioners and p...

User experience (UX), a common practice in corporate settings, is new for many nonprofit organizations. This case study details a community-based research project between nonprofit staff at a community health center and UX professionals to improve the design and usability of a document designed to help immigrant patients sign up for health insuranc...

The design of technology occurs in a rich, nuanced and complex rhetorical space. Technical teams engage in negotiations, and at times argue, about design. We claim that user experience (UX) practice, at its heart, is a rhetorical endeavor, and this aspect of UX practice has been underexplored. To bridge the gap between UX theory and practice, we po...

In order to introduce high school students to the user-centered design process, our team created an outreach activity called the UCD charette. In this experience report, we share how we developed and implemented the charette. We provide background on the rationale and original goals of the charette. Next, we detail how we iteratively developed the...

Reflection is commonly used in the classroom to encourage students to think about and articulate what they have learned. However, when students produce reflections they typically create a written text for the instructor, outside of the classroom and as a summative retrospective account of learning. In this paper, we present the details of how we im...

Human-centered design expands the context and reach of the work of technical communicators and provides an opportunity to investigate and advocate for the needs of vulnerable populations. This article summarizes and contributes to the conversation about social justice occurring in both technical communication and design. Using a variety of qualitat...

As Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) become more diffuse, developers and designers need to consider a growing diversity of users including people with disabilities and aging populations. As a result, computing education needs to respond by providing students opportunities to learn about accessibility and designing for inclusion. Thi...

As information and communication technologies (ICTs) become more diffuse, the diversity of users that designers need to consider is growing; this includes people with disabilities and aging populations. As a result, computing education must provide students the means and inspiration to learn about inclusive design. This poster presents top-level fi...

Over the past 30 years, there has been an ongoing shift in software from a system-centered to user-centered approach. When user-centered approaches are introduced to teams and organizations, conflict often emerges. Conflict could be dismissed as idiosyncratic differences among team members. In this paper, the authors account for conflicts as a clas...

Contexts, tools, and other nonhuman factors are central to the practice and scholarship of technical communication, particularly communication design. But viewed through the lens of posthumanism, these considerations shift from factors to actors: the hierarchy between humans and nonhumans flattens, and the agency of nonhuman actors and assemblages...

Participatory Design (PD) is increasingly applied in marginalized and low-resource communities. This paper looks at how Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) can inform future PD work in these politically contested spaces. We distinguish between these approaches through two participatory photo visual methods: photo elicitation and photovoic...

This experience report describes using iterative field studies to design and evaluate the mobile experience of soundtransit.org. One study aimed to evaluate the design of paper prototypes early in the design process and another study was conducted to test the implementation of an interactive prototype. In this report, we share our experience to pro...

As the user base for ubiquitous technology expands to developing regions, the likelihood of disparity between the lived experience of design team members (developers, designers, researchers, etc.) and end users has increased. Human-centered design (HCD) provides a toolkit of research methods aimed at helping bridge the distance between technology d...

Traditional usability methods are of limited use when evaluating systems designed for distant, diverse populations. In this paper, we describe a study conducted in two Ghanaian villages that evaluated an audio computer designed for people living in oral cultures. Informed by ICTD and orality-grounded HCID, we modified existing usability testing pra...

Mobile phones are widely recognized as a potentially transformative technology platform for developing nations. However, for designers and programmers in the developed world to create viable applications for mobile phones involves first identifying and communicating user requirements for diverse users. We define diverse users as those from a substa...

In this paper, we describe several findings from a multi-year, multi-method study of how information and communication technologies have been adopted and adapted in Central Asia. We have found that mobile phone usage is outpacing the rate of Internet adoption, that access to the Internet is primarily through public access sites carrying with it iss...

With the rapid diversification of computing technologies, user researchers often encounter new applications, new users and scenarios of use, and even new design processes that require new research approaches. (For instance, how do you assess the usability of a roving, multi-user, activity-based system? Or how do you assess a device intended to supp...

This paper discusses how the importance of social networks for performing everyday tasks in the developing world leads to new considerations of the utility of social networking software (SNS). The paper presents some results from a multi-year, multi-method study in Central Asia that tracks patterns of technology adoption and adaptation, as well as...

Engineering education is a complex design activity where educators create a range of teaching artifacts including course curricula, classroom policies, lecture notes, exams, and timelines for student group projects. In order to design such artifacts, engineering faculty must make a series of teaching decisions, each of which can impact their studen...

This paper discusses how the importance of social networks for performing everyday tasks in the developing world leads to new considerations of the utility of social networking software (SNS). The paper presents some results from a multi-year, multi-method study in Central Asia that tracks patterns of technology adoption and adaptation, as well as...