What Is “Eating Right” at Work? User Experience With an Employee Wellness Program

This paper discusses preliminary findings from a user experience study with an Employee Wellness Program (EWP) at a large midwestern university. The EWP is a salient site for studying three types of workplace technical communication: internal program planning documentation; employee-facing promotional materials; and the use of mobile digital technologies for self-tracking and reporting of employee data. Three questions drive this study: (1) How does the EWP describe and enact eating-related wellness practices? (2) How do users experience eating-related promotional technical communications? (3) How do users experience mobile digital technology use related to eating habits within the EWP? Drawing from a larger project, this paper discusses findings from two stages of research: first, a qualitative grounded theory analysis of meeting minutes and promotional materials; and second, a survey of employees focused on user experience with EWP discourse and digital technologies. The EWP facilitates examination of how, as an audience, employees experience and are constructed by employer-driven health-related programming. Preliminary results show that while most employees find the EWP generally beneficial, many also find it invasive, hard to access, and unfriendly to users.