Usability, UX & Professional Communication: Revising a Graduate-Level Course to Integrate More of Rhetoric

Abstract

Usability studies have become an important part of our curriculum in professional writing and communication, contributing to methods for analyzing our audience. But, I have often found in teaching usability a reduction of our rhetorical purpose to methods focused on navigation. Although navigation is important, I examine how we might expand our inquiry to bring more of rhetoric into our analysis. In this essay, I argue that we need to develop ways to think about the user experience from a rhetorical perspective. I also show how to help students design studies to assess how discourse positions audiences; to examine who is invited (or not); to analyze which identities are empowered and disempowered.