I’ve mapped usability (user experience or UX) to the Human Factors spoke on Albers’ Technical Communication hub (TC at the center of IA, ID, Management, and Human Factors). I also find a relationship among Digital Literacy, Information Literacy, and Human Factors – particularly in regard to the practices, activities, and performances of UX professionals (workflow visualization, work process analysis, usability evaluation, and user-centered design).
Here Redish reinforces the relationship of IA-like activities to the traditional position of the TCer within design and development teams. While she agrees that UX professionals come from many different origins, (“[U]sability, user-centered design, and UX design also come from technical communication"), her narrative documents TC’s progression toward usability, mirroring some of my own experiences. Redish writes of interdisciplinary design teams in the late 1970s in which TCers performed front-end user analysis, task analysis, context analysis, and evaluation. TCers, she notes, were performing these tasks as natural extensions of their training in rhetoric and communication years before the term “user experience” was used in a job title. “Not all realize that while technical communication is a practice, it is also a field with underlying theory and research – in rhetoric, discourse analysis, conversational analysis, Speech Act Theory, pragmatics, information design, typography, and cultural studies.”
In a corollary published two laters, Redish and Carol Barnum revisit Redish’s earlier claims and expand the position looking at UX/uasbility from the inside out. This allows them to show the interdisciplinary nature of UX/usability in much the same way TC has done over the years. Yet I find in this positioning some amount of reaching to demonstrate how the continuing expansion of TC roles and responsibilities is reason enough to place TCers at the center of UX/usability. When Barnum states that “… technical communication has grown and expanded beyond the basic tenets of rhetoric and become a discipline,” I have to wonder why so many TC scholars continue to find it necessary to express TC’s relationship to Rhetoric and its shared DNA with Composition.
At a practical level, the corollary does help to further flesh out my map by identifying a range of UX/usability positions, formally held by individuals with “technical writer” on their business card (information architect, usability specialist, user experience designer, usability consultant, user experience architect, etc.).
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