About the Author

Timothy Keirnan is a member of the New Jersey Usability SIG.

STC UUX Community Newsletter
Usability Interface

Kindred Spirits? Usability Practitioners and Technical Communicators

By Timothy Keirnan

At a joint meeting of the Michigan Chapter of the Usability Professionals Association and the Southeast Michigan Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication, held on May 18th, 2006, over 50 people met to hear four local usability practitioners/technical communicators discuss the topic “Kindred Spirits?” Event planners had asked each of the four panel members to discuss their goals in becoming technical communicators and usability practitioners, their educational backgrounds, their current jobs, and their opinions on the degree of overlap between technical communicators and usability practitioners. In addition to myself from Jackson National Life Insurance, the speakers included

• Mary Jane Northrop from Enlighten
• Laurie Kantner from Tec-Ed, Inc.
• Gina Tecos from Compuware Corporation

Based on my studies in grad school and a decade of alternating between consultancies and working “on the inside” of companies, my position is that technical communicators and usability practitioners are not simply kindred spirits—they are the same spirit: the spirit of communication.

Look at the following items common to technical communicators and usability practitioners:

• Text—Used to help end users with explanatory and procedural knowledge, and to help clients or teammates understand the results of user-centered design activities.
  
• Graphics—Used to illustrate procedures and concepts, or to show how a task flow or user interface could be altered for improved productivity.
  
• Structure—Used to imply purpose and location of information or function in documentation, websites, and hardware/software user interfaces.

While not an exhaustive list, these items illustrate how much usability practitioners and technical communicators rely on communication skills and communication “artifacts” to accomplish our purposes. In my case, Miami University’s graduate program in Technical Communication taught a seamless integration of the two roles throughout the curriculum. Some of the textbooks blended usability research and technical communication so thoroughly that it was difficult to tell where one ended and the other began. Titles used (in the mid-90s) included the following:

• Usability: Turning Technology Into Tools by Paul Adler and Terry Winograd
• Rhetoric, Innovation, Technology: Case Studies of Technical Communication in Technology Transfers by Stephen Doheny-Farina
• User-Centered Technology by Robert R Johnson

Johnson’s book was being written at the time I was in grad school, but Bob used the drafts in our classes with him. His teaching and my years of work experience afterward made me realize this central truth: All of us—regardless of job titles or org charts or diplomas—are agents of influence for user-centered design. We work to achieve a more productive, even enjoyable world for our internal and external users. To me, it’s as simple as that.

The combined STC/UPA chapter meeting ended with advice from the four panelists to technical communicators and usability practitioners. My advice to the technical communicators was:

• Perception influences reality.
• Labels influence perception.
• Therefore, using a label such as “technical writing” for a job as inherently multi-disciplinary as ours may not convey the depth, breadth, and importance of the field to audiences such as coworkers and executives. Perhaps “communication” would be a better word to put after the “technical”—it’s a word that, to my mind, connotes the wide range of skills we use, of which writing is indeed a part. Also, I have lately seen the term “tech writer” used by some media outlets to denote technology columnists such as Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal. Language changes over time—we of all people should know that. What seemed a perfectly useful label in the 1960s and 70s may not work as well for us 30 years later.

I’m glad to report I wasn’t driven off the stage after point number three. In fact, there were several attendees who seconded my position and an interesting discussion of professional relevance and labeling ensued.

My advice to usability practitioners was less provocative:

Inter-disciplinary teams create better products; therefore, include training and technical communication folks in product development as early as you would want to be involved. I had the good fortune to be the usability engineer of an application development team where we brought in a fellow technical communicator to design the online help very early in the project. This decision led to some very good online help, but in addition, my teammate provided some brilliant interface design suggestions from his perspective as the online help author. You know you’re on a good team when everyone makes terrific suggestions throughout the project, from the graphic designer to the programmer representative. Had all eight of us not been there contributing our separate, invaluable roles to the project, I am convinced the application’s design would not have been as effective as it was. As the saying goes, we’re all in this together. Or should be, at any rate.

I would like to conclude this article with a big thank-you to Borders Books, which hosted our meeting at its headquarters in Ann Arbor, MI. Professional society chapters owe much to generous corporate sponsors, and the UPA and STC chapters in Michigan would not be as effective without them.