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

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.