Toward TPC-UX: UX Topics in TPC Journals 2013

Abstract

This article offers a content analysis of technical and professional communication articles related to user experience (TPC-UX) published between 2013 and 2022 in six TPC scholarly journals. This analysis reveals that TPC-UX primarily focuses on product and process topics and illustrates the terminological comingling of user experience and usability. Specific TPC-UX topics identified include theory, multimodality, health and medicine, localization, web design, mobile applications, accessibility, and content strategy. These topics suggest that TPC-UX's key affordances are its attunement to networked power dynamics, its theoretically rich treatment of multimodality, and its strategies for navigating contextual complexities.

Keywords

technical and professional communication user experience usability content analysis meta-analysis

Introduction: A Preliminary Sketch of TPC-UX

The relationship between technical and professional communication (TPC), human–computer interaction (HCI), and usability dates to work at the American Institutes for Research during the late 1970s (Redish, 2010). Yet as HCI and early versions of usability have given way to user experience (UX), the relationship between these domains and TPC has proven ambiguous. Some scholars have argued that TPC frameworks offer invaluable vantage points for UX work (Redish, 2010; Redish & Barnum, 2011; Rose & Schreiber, 2021; St. Amant, 2016), while others have argued that UX has fully individuated from TPC and is now an extra-disciplinary concern (Friess & Boettger, 2021).

This ambiguity may stem from UX's inherently transdisciplinary nature—as myriad disciplines, such as computer science, human factors engineering, psychology, and marketing, have contributed to UX theory and practice (Redish, 2010, p. 192; Redish & Barnum, 2011). But TPC, as an academic discipline, offers a wellspring of “theory and research—in rhetoric, discourse analysis, conversational analysis, Speech Act Theory, pragmatics, information design, typography, and cultural studies”—that is invaluable for UX (Redish, 2010, p. 194). And TPC can be considered a keystone discipline for contemporary UX research and design (Redish, 2010; Redish & Barnum, 2011).

Proponents of a TPC orientation to UX work have argued for various avenues by which TPC illuminates UX work. Ginny Redish (2010) argues for four key themes: collaboration, communication, complexity, and change (p. 195). First, because UX requires a coordinated effort between many actors—e.g., subject matter experts, computer programmers, and designers—such work depends on robust collaborative strategies, strategies with which TPC practitioners are well-versed (Redish, 2010, p. 196). Similarly, TPC's long-standing production and critique of user documents has helped attune TPC practitioners to avenues by which products themselves can communicate better and reduce the need for external documentation, a key concern for UX design (Redish, 2010, p. 197). Likewise, TPC's understanding of the probabilistic and situated nature of knowledge appears useful for understanding the complexities of users and their contexts. Finally, the ever-changing landscape of digital products and services is easily navigable by TPC scholars and practitioners because “we have coped with the changes in media, technologies, tools, and methods, and we know that the future holds more of these changes” (Redish, 2010, p. 199).

In an introduction to a special issue on UX in this journal, Rose and Schreiber (2021) chart how Redish's themes have appeared within recent TPC scholarship about UX. Rose and Schreiber (2021) note that collaboration has been addressed on three fronts: TPC's ability to facilitate collaboration (e.g., Walton et al., 2016); how tangled notions of “collaboration, leadership, management, and project management” have created labor valuation concerns (e.g., Lauren & Schreiber, 2018); and the relationship between advocacy, collaboration, and social justice (e.g., Jones, 2016; Walton et al., 2019). The authors connect the theme of complexity to patient experience frameworks and healthcare/medical technologies (e.g., Green, 2021b; Melonçon, 2017), participatory and community-oriented research approaches (e.g., Rose et al., 2017; Shivers-McNair & San Diego, 2017; Simmons & Zoetewey, 2012), “language, translation, and multilingual user experience” (e.g., Cardinal et al., 2020; Gonzales, 2019), inter-/trans-national UX design (e.g., St. Amant, 2016; Sun, 2012; Sun & Getto, 2017), accessibility (e.g., Oswal, 2019), and design thinking (Tham, 2021) (p. 344).

Claims about the alignment between TPC and UX are further supported by Lauer and Brumberger (2016), who found that UX job listings regularly referenced “skills, competencies, and characteristics” that are commonly held by TPC practitioners. The alignment between TPC and UX appears strong enough that Lauer and Brumberger (2016) propose orienting TPC programs toward placing students in UX roles. Similarly, Kirk St. Amant (2017a) links “the research we [TPC scholars and practitioners] do in understanding usability and design based upon user experiences and expectations” to the messy, dynamic relationships among various contexts, information contents, and means of conveyance (p. 4–5). St. Amant (2017a) argues that the situated complexities wrought from navigating across contexts, contents, and conveyances offer a wealth of collaborative opportunities for TPC (p. 5).

The work of these scholars suggests that UX is a rich site for TPC and that it affords the application of a multiplicity of theories and practices. As Rose and Schreiber (2021) write, TPC work about UX “illustrate[s] a move into new spaces, incorporating new methods and forging new connections, to provide us an opportunity to conceptualize the continuously evolving relationship between the fields" (p. 345). This article seeks to further this conversation (Redish, 2010; Redish & Barnum, 2011; Rose & Schreiber, 2021; St. Amant 2016; St. Amant, 2017a) by formally mapping the vectors and velocities of topics within TPC scholarship about UX within our discipline's major journals. For the sake of conciseness, I will use the initialism TPC-UX to refer to the scholarship that occupies the intersection of TPC and UX. Based on my analysis, I argue that TPC-UX is a hybridization of TPC and UX that offers several key affordances to UX design: an attunement to networked power dynamics, a theoretically rich understanding of multimodality, and a wealth of strategies for navigating contextual complexities.

Research Questions: What Do We Talk About When We Talk About UX?

If UX is a vital site for TPC work, several meta-analytical questions arise. The first and most pressing is, in brief, what are we, as TPC scholars, talking about when we talk about UX? Ancillary questions are of the permanence and change of TPC-UX topics across time within TPC scholarship. Formally, I seek to answer three research questions about TPC-UX in this article:

RQ 1: What topics can be identified in TPC scholarship related to UX between 2013 and 2022?

RQ 2: What do these topics indicate about emerging and retreating trends within TPC scholarship concerning UX across this period?

RQ 3: Do these trends indicate useful vectors for UX—specifically in terms of communication, collaboration, complexity, and change (Redish, 2010) or context, content, and conveyance (St. Amant, 2016, 2017a)—that can help practitioners offer more compelling, ethical, and eudemonic experiences for users or help TPC-UX academics train future generations of practitioners?

By answering these questions, TPC scholars and practitioners can more easily make value propositions for including TPC in UX processes, understand the territory and flows of TPC-UX research, and better identify gaps between TPC-UX research and organizational UX practices.

Meta-Analyses in TPC Scholarship

As TPC has matured as an academic discipline, meta-analyses of scholarship have become commonplace (e.g., Boettger & Friess, 2016; Boettger & Lam, 2013; Carradini, 2022; Melonçon & St. Amant, 2019; Rude, 2009; Smith, 2000; Thompson, 2001; White et al., 2016). While some analyses use “thick” descriptions that offer granular assessments of certain topics—for instance, integrative literature reviews (see Acharya, 2022a; Clark 2016; Melonçon & Warner, 2017)—many meta-analyses in TPC have illustrated the utility of “thin descriptions” (Carradini, 2022, p. 43), which are somewhat distant readings of the patterns within a disciplinary corpus. As Mueller (2017) writes, “Distant and thin treatments foster primary, if tentative and provisional, insights into… network sense—incomplete but nevertheless vital glimpses of an interconnected disciplinary domain focused on relationships that define and cohere widespread scholarly activity” (p. 3).

Meta-analytical methods were employed by Smith (2000) to argue that “the malleable nature of the discipline [i.e., TPC] allows it to draw from across the disciplines for research and theoretical support and to incorporate changes in practice” (p. 452). Building on Smith (2000), Boettger and Friess (2016) have argued that divergences between academic and practitioner concerns, as evidenced via content analysis, indicate that TPC is a “fragmented discipline” and that it requires greater practitioner investment (p. 314). Melonçon and St. Amant (2019) used a meta-analytical content analysis to determine trends in empirical research methods and methodologies within TPC; the authors indicate that such reflective research is necessary for ensuring sustainable research production and for identifying the unique features of TPC compared to other academic disciplines. Friess and Boettger (2021) have used this research approach to compare scholarly TPC topics to practitioner topics; they argue that communication strategies and collaboration offer avenues for bridging the academic/practitioner divide. Carradini (2022) used a content analysis of keywords in TPC scholarly abstracts to identify changes in TPC topics between 2000 and 2017; the author argues that his findings “point the field toward the future,” a future wherein “an expanded set of practitioners work[] with researchers to understand and analyze the work of an increasingly-but-not-entirely digital workplace so that knowledge can make its way back to the classroom” (p. 65). This article methodologically draws on these “thin descriptions” in TPC to assess the salience and trajectories of TPC-UX topics.

Research Design: Mixed-Methods Content Analysis

Following Smagorinsky's (2008) directive that methods sections should serve as “conceptual epicenters” for research reports, I will briefly argue for my conceptual methodological framework—a pragmatic mixed-methods approach (see Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2009) to content analysis—and explain its utility for addressing my research questions. Though I believe this research is ultimately replicable, aggregable, and data-driven (Haswell, 2005), it differs enough from previous meta-analyses to warrant explanation.

Friess and Boettger (2021) define content analysis as “the systematic, objective, and quantitative analysis of message characteristics that adheres to the standards of the scientific method” (p. 413; see Boettger & Palmer, 2010; Neuendorf, 2016). But this article should not be considered a post-positivistic attempt at objectivity. Rather, I agree with Carradini (2022) who argues that “quantitative analysis… points out areas where the scholar should investigate the texts further” (p. 43). Statistical indicators offer a pragmatic approach for determining salient patterns across (relatively) large swaths of data, but such indicators, by default, cannot offer narratives, reveal situated knowledge, or make qualitative assessments (Haraway, 1988; Merry, 2016; cf. Boettger & Palmer, 2010).

In brief, I used NVivo to comprehensively code a corpus of 119 articles using a codebook from a previous TPC meta-analysis (Friess & Boettger, 2021), compared various indices, and generated descriptive statistics—largely chi-square tests of independence and Pearson correlation coefficients. Chi-square tests of independence serve to test whether there are statistically significant relationships between categorical variables (e.g., topics and forums), and Pearson correlation coefficients are measures of correlation between two variables (e.g., frequency and time). These descriptive statistics were selected based on a conversation with a PhD-holding data scientist working in industry (M. Kirschner, personal communication, April 2023)¹ and served to help identify salient patterns across the corpus, patterns which suggested areas for fruitful closer examinations of the scholarship.

Next, I used keyword analysis protocol that borrowed strategies from grounded coding (e.g., Strauss, 1987) and worked to connect the quantifiable patterns to the TPC-UX themes of communication, collaboration, complexity, change, context, content, and conveyance. Combining these approaches allowed for an iterative method that hybridized inductive and deductive approaches to qualitative analysis (see Armborst, 2017) and was supported by quantitative indicators (see Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2009). This approach allowed me to pursue emergent patterns without being beholden to a rigid, inflexible protocol. In the following sections, I detail the three broad phrases of my approach: initial corpus building, top-down (deductive) topic coding, and bottom-up (inductive) keyword coding. Initial statistical analysis is blended into the following sections. The most frequent inductive codes and their statistical analyses are presented in the next major section.

Corpus Building

To collect articles for this investigation, I used the five TPC journals that are frequently cited as key disciplinary forums in other meta-analyses (e.g., Friess & Boettger, 2021; Melonçon & St. Amant, 2019; Smith, 2000). These journals are as follows:

Journal of Business and Technical Communication (JBTC)

Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (JTWC)

IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication (IEEE)

Technical Communication (TC)

Technical Communication Quarterly (TCQ)

Based on conversations with an established TPC scholar (J. Bay, personal communication, September 2022),² I decided to also collect articles from Communication Design Quarterly (CDQ). CDQ was likely not included in previous meta-analyses of TPC literature due to its relatively recent inception. But, at present, CDQ offers over a decade's worth of TPC scholarship and is therefore a useful forum to consider in meta-analyses.³

I used the search query User Experience OR UX and the date range of January 1, 2013, to December 31, 2022, to collect articles from the six TPC journals. Articles were collected via a university library database, publisher websites (e.g., Taylor and Francis), and targeted searches (due to the latency of online publication and indexing). Book reviews and editorial introductions were omitted from the corpus.

Ultimately, a collection of 302 articles was saved to Zotero. These articles were then categorized as either having UX and immediately adjacent concerns that fall within a broad notion of UX (e.g., user interface design, usability testing, user research) as a primary topic or as secondary topics based on titles, abstracts, and keywords. The articles with UX as a secondary topic tended to be more general articles that referenced UX in passing. In total, 119 articles were categorized as having UX and immediately adjacent concerns as primary topics. These 119 articles comprise the corpus for this article.

Table 1 presents the frequency of articles across the journals. As is evident from a cursory examination of the frequencies, CDQ has become the preeminent forum for TPC-UX articles. A chi-square test of goodness of fit supports this claim at a remarkable level of statistical significance (p ≤ .05), X² (5, n = 119) = 75.11414, p = 8.771e-15.⁴ The lack of examination of CDQ in Friess and Boettger's (2021) content analysis could explain their claim that UX has fully divorced from TPC.

Table 1.

Distribution of Articles Across TPC Journals.

TPC journal	Article count
Communication Design Quarterly (CDQ)	49
IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication (IEEE)	7
Journal of Business and Technical Communication (JBTC)	5
Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (JTCW)	14
Technical Communication (TC)	31
Technical Communication Quarterly (TCQ)	13
Total	119

Note. CDQ is the preeminent forum for TPC-UX scholarship. Including this journal in addition to the canonical five TPC journals allows for a more representative analysis of TPC-UX scholarly articles. As of 2023, CDQ has been in continuous publication for over a decade.

Coding and Analysis: Broad Topics

Adapting Friess and Boettger's (2021) codebook, I coded first for the broad topics of process, profession, product, and education by examining titles, abstracts, keywords, introductions, and conclusions of the articles. For this research, process refers to articles that “focused on part or all of the tasks involved in producing and delivering a product” (Friess & Boettger, 2021, p. 416), including frameworks, theoretical positions, or models. Profession refers to articles concerning how technical communicators, UX designers, user researchers, and communication designers “perceived themselves or their field” (Friess & Boettger, 2021, p. 417). Profession does not include professional academics’ perceptions of their disciplines or higher education work contexts, nor does it include research with various stakeholders or co-designing participants who are not themselves professionals in UXD, communication design, or user research. Rather, workplace ethnographies of TPC-UX practitioners (e.g., Rose & Tenenberg, 2018) or interviews, surveys, etc. with such practitioners (e.g., Lanius et al., 2021) would be archetypal examples of this topic. Product refers to articles concerned with examination or critique of specific artifacts – including UIs, user research reports, mockups, or other tangible deliverables. Finally, education refers to all articles with a pedagogical concern or an emphasis on the TPC classroom. In coding for these categories, I coded nonexclusively and allowed articles to be double coded. For instance, Lanius et al.'s “User Experience Methods in Research and Practice” (2021) was coded to both the process and profession categories because the article presents research related to research processes within professional UX contexts.

Table 2 presents a contingency table of the broad topics across the TPC journals. A chi-square test of independence did not find a statistically significant (p ≤ .05) relationship between broad topics and forums, X² (15, n = 150) = 19.00, p = .21359797. But some initial patterns are worth noting. For instance, product and process are consistently overrepresented in TPC-UX scholarship, while education and profession are underrepresented, a trend which echoes the findings of Friess and Boettger's (2021) content analysis. The recurrence of this pattern suggests it is a common pattern across all TPC scholarships not just TPC-UX scholarship. CDQ and JTWC tended to emphasize process articles; IEEE, JBTC, and TCQ have relatively even distributions across the four broad topics, aside from an absence of profession topics in JBTC and TCQ; and TC tended to emphasize product and process while having the fewest education articles of any of the forums.

Table 2.

Broad Topic Frequencies Across TPC Journals.

Journal	Broad topics
Journal	Product	Process	Education	Profession
CDQ	18	36	7	2
IEEE	3	2	2	1
JBTC	4	2	2	0
JTWC	5	9	2	2
TC	17	15	1	2
TCQ	6	7	5	0

Note. A chi-square test of independence did not find a statistically significant relationship between the variables of broad topic and journal, X² (15, n = 150) = 19.00, p = .21359797. But the overall paucity of profession-coded scholarship in TPC-UX appears a noteable trend across these forums.

Next, I tagged all articles with the year of publication (as indexed by Zotero)⁵ and determined Pearson correlation coefficients both for article frequency over time and for broad topic frequency over time. In brief, Pearson correlation coefficients range from −1, which signifies a perfect negative correlation, to 1, which signifies a perfect positive correlation. A coefficient of .5 is read as a strong positive correlation; a coefficient of −.5 is read as a strong negative correlation. Tellingly, all correlations across time for these broad topics were weak, and none approached statistical significance (p ≤ .05). The weak correlations suggest that the discipline's focus on these topics is relatively unaffected by time and that TPC largely emphasizes processes and products (see Friess & Boettger, 2021). The descriptive statistics are as follows:

For all articles over time, a weak positive correlation was found, r(8) = 0.1716, p = .635485.

For the broad topic of product, a weak positive correlation was found, r(8) = 0.3008, p = .398374.

For process, a very weak and statistically insignificant correlation was found, r(8) = 0.0986, p = .786397.

For education, a positive but weak correlation was found, r(8) = 0.3525, p = .317788.

For profession, a weak negative correlation was found, r(8) = −0.2478, p = .491462.

Concerningly, these statistics suggest, but do not verify, a decreasing focus on professionals and professional contexts within TPC-UX scholarship. The frequencies of these broad topics over time are shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1.

Frequency of broad topics over time.

Coding: Primary Topics Indexed via Keyword Categories

Following the broad topic coding, I coded for primary topics within the articles. Because usability/UX was a primary topic in Friess and Boettger's (2021) analysis, I could not adapt their approach for this procedure. Rather, following Carradini (2022), I decided to use terminological frequency to chart the primary topics within this corpus. I used a keyword analysis procedure, which entailed using NVivo's grounded coding function to collect keywords from all the articles.⁶ Based on this initial procedure, I generated 447 discrete keywords—though some of these were due to minor variations in spelling/term, e.g., UXD versus user experience design, or the accidental inclusion of a blank space. Using an axial coding procedure (Simmons, 2017) to generate keyword categories, I was able to reduce the 447 discrete keywords to 124 keyword categories. The most frequently occurring keyword categories are shown in Table 3 and are discussed in the following section.

Table 3.

Most Common Nonexclusive Keyword Categories.

Keyword category	Example aggregated keywords	Articles in category
User experience	User experience, user experience design, UX research, user experience analysis	62
Usability	Usability, usability studies, usability testing, speculative usability	44
Theory-driven	Social justice, culture, queer theory, new materialism, actor-network theory, Deleuze	27
Multimodality	Visuals, audio descriptions, visual rhetoric, visual analysis, video, image, icon	24
Health and medicine	mHealth apps, health communication, health literacy, e-health, evidence-based medicine, health insurance, PPE, public health	22
Mobile	Mobile app, mobile devices, mobility, smartphone, mobile user experiences	11
User-centered design	UCD, user-centered design, user-centered	10
Localization	Localization, technology localization, user localization	9
Accessibility	Accessible design (AD), deafness, disability, screen reader, visual impairment	7
Content strategy	Content, content management system, blogging, corporate blogging	7
Web design	Web design, web development, website development, web aesthetics	7
Aging	Older adults, senior, senior users	4
Participatory design	Participatory design, participatory archives	4
Pedagogy	Education, online classes, service learning, teacher training, textbooks, place-based pedagogy	4
Personas	Persona, personas	4
Context	Context, contexts of use	3
Global	Global, Global South and Global North, global markets	3
Risk communication	Risk, risk communication	3

Keyword Category Analysis and Discussion

In this section, I quantitatively examine the emergence or retreat of keyword categories between 2013 and 2022 and then make qualitative connections between these categories and the themes of communication, collaboration, complexity, change, context, content, and conveyance. I begin by unpacking the terminological comingling of user experience and usability. Next, I look at the major categories of theory-driven, (rhetorical) multimodality, and health and medicine. Finally, I discuss the less common, but salient, categories of localization, web design, mobile applications, accessibility, and content strategy. These keyword categories are indicative of the major topical vectors and their velocities within the TPC-UX scholarly assemblage.

Terminological Comingling of User Experience and Usability

The aggregated keyword categories of user experience (n = 62) and usability (n = 44) were both heavily represented in the corpus, which, again, was collected using the search phrase user experience or UX and was cleaned to omit articles with mere passing references to UX-related concerns. Over 20 articles occur within both categories—an occurrence which suggests a significant terminological comingling of user experience and usability within TPC scholarship.⁷ Though user experience appears to be becoming the main term within TPC-UX, usability has proven to have a surprisingly long half-life.

To determine the change over time of these terms’ frequencies, I generated Pearson correlation coefficients for both user experience and usability. The user experience Pearson correlation coefficient was r(8) = 0.4318, p = .106, and for usability, it was r(8) = 0.1627, p = .653. Both correlation coefficients suggest positive correlations between the terms’ frequencies and time, but neither correlation coefficient rises to the level of robust statistical significance (p ≤ .05). Tellingly, user experience has a much stronger correlation coefficient than usability and a much lower p-value. This suggests that user experience as a keyword category is increasing in frequency over time more so and with greater statistical significance than usability, at least within this corpus. A chi-square test of independence did not reveal a significant relationship between the usability and user experience keyword categories and the nonexclusive broad topic frequencies, x² (3, n = 135) = 1.8697, p = .599879. This suggests that these keyword categories cannot be differentiated in terms of their focus on product, process, education, or profession. In parallel with the entire corpus, both categories tended to emphasize product and process topics.

Articles within the corpus suggest that the transition from usability to user experience was intentionally cultivated within TPC-UX. For instance, Zhou (2014) critiqued a usability emphasis in TPC classrooms along the following lines: its lack of early engagement with design, its limited iterative potential, its lack of engagement within organizational contexts, and a detachment between the objects of usability testing and their initial contexts. Zhou (2014) argues that “[t]echnical communication programs must conceptually broaden usability into user experience, achieve a breadth and depth in user experience, train students to see user experience as an iterative, agile, participatory, and formative process, and cultivate innovative design thinking and problem-solving” (p. 27).

Yet, usability has retained its salience as a term. For instance, Acharya (2022a) conducted an integrative literature review of usability articles within TPC scholarship to argue that “usability is a multifaceted construct used by different disciplines for different purposes and meanings” and that “usability, particularly in TC, is now broadly perceived as a rhetorical practice for designing a product that satisfies the demands and contingencies of culturally diverse users, including underserved and underprivileged user groups, in the increasingly globalized world” (p. 10). Ultimately, Acharya (2022a) argues for an approach to usability that is attuned to social justice and its attendant sociocultural concerns. Such an approach to usability appears to have some traction within the discipline (e.g., Ramler, 2021), but Acharya's (2022a) discussion of usability appears to bleed into user experience territory:

Building usability into a product requires more than achieving pragmatic and/or user experience goals of usability. It also requires understanding users’ entire perceptions of use, their interpretation of those perceptions, and resulting changes in their personal and social lives. To meet these requirements in national and international contexts, attention should be given to the sociocultural goals of usability during the design process, which, in turn, will promote social justice and user empowerment. (p. 14, emphasis added)

Discussions of usability like Acharya's (2022a) suggest that user experience and usability share significations within TPC. Working to untangle these terms—for instance, by treating usability as a component of user experience rather than a discrete concern—appears a necessary move for the discipline.

As an aside, it is worth noting that user-centered design, as a keyword category, was strongly negatively correlated with time at a suggestive level of significance, r(8) = -0.5394, p = .107901. This indicates that, while user experience and usability are terminologically comingled, user-centered design has decreased as a salient keyword and/or topic during this period (Figure 2). The rapid emergence and disappearance of user-centered design may spring from that term's emergence within scholarly TPC work (e.g., Johnson, 1998; Salvo, 2001) rather than industry contexts, contexts in which user experience and usability still have sway (see Friess & Boettger, 2021; Lauer & Brumberger, 2016). Similarly, the more contemporary term experience architecture (see Potts & Salvo, 2017) was absent in the keyword data. These patterns suggest difficulty in achieving practitioner buy-in for academic terminology and, perhaps, illustrate a need for more profession-oriented TPC-UX scholarship.⁸

Figure 2.

User experience, usability, and user-centered design topic frequencies 2013–2022.

Theory-Driven TPC-UX

During the axial keyword coding, theory-driven emerged as a salient category within the data (n = 27). This category was aggregated from articles related to various strains of critical theory—e.g., intersectionality, new materialisms, and queer theory. Using Pearson's correlation coefficient, I found a strong positive correlation between time and the frequency of theory-driven TPC-UX articles, r(8) = 0.5419, p = .10565. Though this correlation is below the level of robust significance (p ≤ .05), it does illustrate that theory is becoming more salient within TPC-UX and illustrates that the broader “social turn” in TPC (Agboka, 2013, 2014; Colton & Holmes, 2018; Jones et al., 2016; Walton et al., 2019) has importance within the domain of TPC-UX. Theory-driven work has, perhaps, become so commonplace that some theory-driven TPC-UX scholarship is not even indexed as such via keywords (e.g., Clinkenbeard, 2018; Gallagher & Holmes, 2019). The articles included in this aggregated keyword category illustrate how theoretical approaches to TPC allow for a grappling with the complex contexts of use and the intersectional complexities of end users.

But, as with the other keyword categories, we find again an underrepresentation of profession and education-oriented research for theory-driven TPC-UX scholarship, in general. Extending a discussion of theory-driven TPC-UX, especially that with a social justice telos, into the domains of education and professionalism would complement TPC's useful articulation of those concepts in other areas (e.g., Cox, 2019; Jones, 2017). This category can be chunked into two sub-categories: post-humanism and justice theories.

Post-Humanism: New Materialisms and Speculative Realisms

Post-humanist theories, such as new materialism and speculative realism, offer a commonplace theoretical position for scholarship within TPC (see Moore & Richards, 2018; Walton et al., 2019, p. 5). Such theories decenter human agents and illuminate the complexities and ambiguities of contexts composed of human and non-human actors and actants. Post-humanist theories’ importance within TPC precedes the high watermarks of the “social turn” within the discipline (e.g., Jones et al., 2016; Walton et al., 2019) and, perhaps, is a theoretical stratum upon which the contemporary iteration of the “social turn” and its emphasis on the human agent, who is enmeshed in socially intersectional and material networks, occurs.

For instance, Zobel (2013) offers a process-focused discussion of how Deleuzian assemblage theory allows an avenue for addressing complexity in mobile device user experiences: “Once the system can be seen as a collection of components and elements, assemblage allows the researcher to try and make sense of the elements and relationships that specifically interest them without being overwhelmed by the rest of the system” (p. 21). Similarly, Rivers & Söderlund (2016) have used Bruno Latour's actor network theory (ANT) to advance their concept of Speculative Usability, a theoretical approach to usability studies that “promotes a partnership with objects” and “works both within and against traditional and contemporary understandings of usability testing and research to increase the scope of relations we attend to in usability testing” (p. 142). More recently, Slotkin (2020) examined a Jewish cemetery to argue for viewing “technical communication… as an embodied act of cultural circulation” because of an “ongoing and co-constitutive process of intra-activity” between mourners and material instantiations of religious iconography and epitaphs (p. 22–23).

Justice Theories: Intersectionality, Indigeneity, and Queerness

Though post-humanism presents an initial theoretical stratum within TPC-UX, justice theories are by far the dominant theory drivers within TPC-UX at present. This vector of TPC scholarship is robustly apparent in TPC-UX scholarship from 2013 to 2022 and illustrates avenues by which TPC-UX scholars and practitioners have grappled with the complexities of intersectional identities and their attendant oppressions.

An example of social justice-oriented TPC-UX work is Jones’s (2016) argument for incorporating narrative inquiry, a feminist method, into human-centered design processes: “As feminist perspectives inherently seek social justice, adopting feminist tools to achieve social justice can be a useful approach” (p. 477). Jones (2016) argues that designers should consider “social justice aims the end-goal and primary objective of the design process” and that user-generated narratives “can help designers to be more critical of oppressive structures embedded in designs and the design process” (p. 490).

In terms of TPC-UX's focus on collaboration (see Redish, 2010), Shivers-McNair and San Diego (2017) examine how collaboration between community strategists and UX designers can support localization processes. The authors write, “the multifaceted localization practices of community strategists intersect with and are integral to user experience and user localization processes” (p. 109). Moreover, they argue that “collaboration—between researchers and practitioners, and among community strategists, technical communicators, and user experience researchers—is itself a localization practice that can support design, engagement, knowledge-making, and social justice work” (p. 109). As such, when TPC-UX scholars and practitioners consider the terms diversity and community, they should ground those terms in “meaningful, localized engagement, not [a priori] assumptions” (p. 110). Like Walton et al. (2019), they emphasize that such an approach to TPC-UX requires concrete action: “Inclusivity is more than simply having people of diverse backgrounds, identities, and abilities in an organization or community; it is actively making people welcome” (p. 110).

Using an Indigenous, narrative approach to TPC-UX, Rivera (2022) has advanced testimonios as an avenue by which Indigenous “worldings” (see Agbozo, 2022, p. 16) can become foregrounded. Rivera (2022) writes that “Testimonios are narratives that emphasize an individual's wholistic [sic] relationship with a product, service, process, or content” (p. 9). This method “links a personal account to the collective experience of the community to which the individual belongs, which yields valuable information to examine the cultural and social roots of an issue” (p. 9). Like narrative inquiry, which grants access to the narrator's epistemic and ontological frameworks (Jones, 2017), testimonios grant access to broader community understandings.

Elsewhere, scholars have used queer theory to resist heteronormativity and to offer useful, actionable insights into UXD. For instance, working at the intersection of medicine/healthcare, risk communication, and TPC-UX, Green (2021a) examines how Grindr's UI affects HIV disclosure and the UI's underlying ideology. Green (2021a) argues that, at the level of theory, “integrating unruliness, risk communication, and UX helps explain how digital health technologies… reinforce normative constructions of risk” and by “turning attention toward these unruly user experiences reveals alternative practices of risk assessment and ulterior understandings of health that go unsupported by digital interfaces” (p. 272). In a similar vein, Ramler (2021) has advanced an approach to usability—queer usability—that serves as a counter to “digital inhospitality” (p. 345). This approach to usability is guided by inclusion and safety (Ramler, 2021, p. 345) rather than the “extreme usability” of the Nielsen Norman Group that is guided solely by ease of use (see Dilger, 2006).

This is far from an exhaustive review of the articles associated with justice-oriented TPC-UX. Moreover, if the category is broadened beyond mere keyword aggregations, we find that social justice is a key driver of much TPC-UX work. For instance, the needs of aging users (Kirkscey, 2021; Loorbach et al., 2013; Siebenhandl et al., 2013; Smith, 2022), the associated idea of embodiment (Melonçon, 2017; Valino Koh et al., 2013), multilingualism (e.g., Gonzales & Turner, 2017), and accessibility (discussed below) have all offered avenues by which scholars have demonstrated TPC-UX's attunements to social justice.

(Rhetorical)Multimodality as a Topical Stratum in TPC-UX

During axial coding, multimodality emerged as a significant category (n = 24). A Pearson correlation coefficient for the category did not indicate that this category had significantly increased in frequency between 2013 and 2022, r(8) = 0.1714, p = .635885. The weak correlation and high frequency of articles within this category suggest that multimodality is a topical stratum within the corpus. Broadly, the articles within this category demonstrate a repeated concern with conveyance—e.g., information visualization (Meng, 2019; Passera & Haapio, 2013; Qian et al., 2014), the function of icons and other UI components (Gallagher & Holmes, 2019; Kascak et al., 2013), and interactive technologies (Tham, 2018; Valino Koh et al., 2013)—within varying contexts marked by complexity—e.g., e-health and telemedicine (Campbell, 2022; Lazard & Mackert, 2015), risk communication technologies (Richards, 2018), and cross-cultural communications (Li et al., 2021).

The keywords that comprise the multimodality category had the most frequent occurrences of the term rhetoric compared to other categories. For instance, Gallagher and Holmes (2019) draw on visual rhetoric, embodied rhetoric, and Pierre Bourdieu's habitus to argue that empty state pages “shape user habits through embodied repetition” and that “[s]uch habituation necessitates specific attention to the ways in which interfaces shape user habits even as users communicate creatively through them for a variety of rhetorical purposes” (p. 272). Similarly, Campbell (2022) uses visual and digital rhetorical theory to examine the rhetoricities of telemedicine UIs and provide practitioners with rhetorically attuned usability heuristics. The linking of multimodality and explicit discussions of rhetoric may stem from the long-standing interest in multimodality within the academic discipline of rhetoric and composition (e.g., Hocks, 2003), a discipline with which TPC has a long-standing relationship (Sullivan & Porter, 1993). Indeed, my use of this term to axially categorize these keywords perhaps stems from my training within that discipline. Speculatively, I think that integrating further rhetorical theory could be a useful move within TPC-UX for critically engaging with other, currently less common, aspects of multimodality that undoubtedly affect user experiences— e.g., sonic rhetorics (see Hocks & Comstock, 2017; Katz, 2020) and haptic rhetorics (see Walters, 2014).

The Healthcare and Medical Turn in TPC-UX

During the period covered within this analysis, health and medicine emerged as a major keyword category (n = 22) that covers over 20% of the corpus (n = 119). But an initial Pearson correlation coefficient showed a weak, statically insignificant correlation between time and this category's frequency, r(8) = 0.2189, p = .543449. This surprisingly low correlation could spring from the founding of the academic journal Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (RHM) and a migration of health and medicine-focused TPC-UX to that journal. Indeed, by controlling for the first 3 years of RHM's publication (2018–2020), a much stronger correlation with greater statistical significance was found, r(5) = 0.502, p = .250969. The flurry of this scholarship within the TPC-UX domain and elsewhere (e.g., RHM) suggests that, alongside the social turn of the 2010s, TPC has also undergone a medical/healthcare turn.

As Rose and Schreiber (2021) note, the medical turn in TPC-UX scholarship illustrates an engagement with complexity. An early example of this complexity is Kascak et al.'s (2013) examination of how older adults respond to icon designs in remote patient monitoring devices. Their research indicates how usability protocols can facilitate broader UX designs within medical contexts and the necessity of being attuned to the emergent, embodied complexities that accompany aging. Similarly, Rose et al. (2017) engaged in a community-based research project to examine the usability of health insurance information for immigrant populations in the United States. Their research reveals the utility of collaboration between TPC-UX scholars and community partners as well as the difficulties faced in accounting for the lived complexities of immigrant groups: “Community-based UX collaborations can amplify multiple types of expertise… [but] UX methods may need to be adapted to be appropriate for community-based collaborations that incorporate local knowledge and needs” (p. 228). Finally, Green's (2021a, 2021b) work regarding HIV disclosure and communication reveals the medical complexities faced by some end users of designed systems.

Focus on health and medicine within TPC-UX has generated the emergent area of patient experience design (PXD) (Melonçon, 2016, 2017). Melonçon (2017) indicates that this “new term was necessary because our existing terminology (e.g., user experience, usability, participatory design) was not adequate to capture the necessary attitude that researchers and practitioners need to do user experience and usability work in healthcare contexts” (p. 19). PXD occupies the intersection of technical communication, patient-centered values, and UX, and it relies on the competencies of audience analysis, usability, and health literacy (Melonçon, 2017, p. 20). Melonçon (2017) argues that PXD is methodological in its application: “Thinking of PXD as a way to actually do research, that is, a methodological orientation that asks the field to reconsider contexts of use, and embodiment, while encouraging the development of new usability methods” (p. 25). The emergence of PXD illustrates how TPC-UX can provide actionable insights in complex contexts, especially in terms of the conveyance of complex content—such as the information provided via patient documents.

More recently, health and medicine TPC-UX work has examined telemedicine UIs (e.g., Campbell, 2022), mobile health applications (e.g., Acharya, 2022b; Kirkscey, 2021; Welhausen & Bivens, 2021), and wearable health technologies (Arduser, 2018; Jones et al., 2017). Given that much of this research has migrated to RHM, future meta-analyses of TPC-UX scholarship, or general TPC scholarship, should consider this journal in their analyses.

Other Salient Keyword Categories

This section details other commonly occurring keyword categories that were more infrequent than the previously discussed categories. These categories—localization, web design, mobile applications, accessibility, and content strategy—illustrate other key vectors for TPC-UX.

Localization: Collaboration Within Complex (Power-Laden) Contexts

Localization, as a keyword category (n = 9), was not as frequently occurring as the previously discussed categories, but as a keyword category, it is strongly correlated with time at a level that borders on robust statistical significance, r(8) = 0.6089, p = .061711. Discussion of localization frequently co-occurs alongside discussions of collaborative design practices and the complexities of local contexts. For instance, Gonzales and Zantjer (2015) have suggested examining the localized translation practices of multilingual language users so that TPC can develop stronger localization and translation frameworks. Shivers-McNair and San Diego (2017) have argued that localization requires a fourfold application—communities, goals, communication, and inclusion—and that collaboration with community strategists is invaluable for this work. More recently, Acharya (2022b) has examined the localized usability of mobile healthcare applications: “Engaging multicultural healthcare practitioners as co-designers by embracing and developing effective localized user research methods…can foreground the intentionality of localized design for culturally diverse healthcare practitioners in the increasingly globalized world” (p. 56). Yet, localization practices have also been critiqued due to their flattening of power imbalances between developer cultures and user cultures. Agbozo (2022) is worth quoting at length about this matter:

Technology localization work must advocate for technological equity—the fair and just participation of marginalized people to ensure social, economic, and political inclusion. Usability and social justice concerns should be fundamental to the planning of and preparations toward technology localization work and not an afterthought at the implementation stages. In other words, technology localization work must rethink the fundamental discursive infrastructure that leads to the production, adaptation, reconceptualization, use of, and resistance to technologies in local contexts. This rethinking must start with acknowledging the sovereignty of local knowledge-making as legitimate grounding for local worldings. (p. 16, emphasis added)

Thus, localization practices within TPC-UX benefit from the inclusion of critical theories of power that are attuned to post-colonial contexts and the myriad manifestations of oppression there. As a corollary finding, global was an uncommon keyword category (n = 3) within this corpus, and two of the three articles within that category explicitly touch on localization (Acharya, 2022b; Getto & St. Amant, 2015).

Web Design and Mobile Applications: Changing Means of Conveyance

Two key means of information conveyance—web design (n = 7) and mobile applications (n = 11)—were apparent in the keyword categories. But the frequencies of these keyword categories were negatively correlated with time. Web design was moderately negatively correlated with time at a suggestive level of statistical significance, r(8) = −0.4235, p = .223235; mobile applications were weakly negatively correlated with time at a low level of statistical significance, r(8) = −0.2724 p = .450581. The decline of web design is unsurprising as Web 2.0 content has become increasingly siloed in websites that allow for only minor user alteration of UI design. The most recent article dealing with web design in this corpus was Altamirano and Stephen's (2022) experience report about complex risk communication content. Mobile application's decline in frequency is more surprising, but given that smartphones have been widespread for nearly two decades, perhaps the topic has become too commonplace to be indexed in keywords. The most recent articles in this corpus relating to mobile applications largely deal with more critical assessments—e.g., Agbozo's (2022) post-colonial critique of GhanaPostGPS and localization procedures—or emergent mobile application uses, such as locative media (Butts & Jones, 2021; Oppegaard, 2020). Based on the trends within this corpus, it is likely that Web 3.0, immersive UX/virtual reality, and Internet of Things topics (see Tham, 2018) will increase in frequency and then taper off in keyword frequency as they emerge.

Accessibility: Advocating Appropriate Conveyances for Complex User Bases

Accessibility (n = 7), as a keyword category, occurs across the time frame of this corpus and has a weak positive correlation with time, r(8) = 0.3789, p = .28025, that suggests a slight uptick in concern with this topic between 2013 and 2022. Broadly, the emphasis on accessibility in TPC-UX scholarship can be thought of as approaches to content conveyance that are attuned to the embodied complexities of embodied users. Moreover, the keyword category accessibility overlaps with several of the previously discussed categories—e.g., health and medicine (Jones et al., 2017), theory driven (Hutter & Lawrence, 2018; Sonka et al., 2021), and multimodality (Oppegaard & Rabby, 2022). The emphasis on accessibility across these domains supports the idea of a TPC-UX practitioner functioning as a user advocate. As Sonka et al. (2021) write, “by placing accessibility at the center of our [TPC pedagogy] mission, our goal is to address not only the need for industry practitioners, but to keep to our program's commitment to creating UXs centered around… shared values of accessibility, sustainability, and usability” (p. 272).

Content Strategy: Changes in Content Communication Strategies

Finally, content strategy (n = 7) has moderately increased between 2013 and 2022, r(8) = 0.4681, p = .172442. Alongside design thinking and artificial intelligence (AI), content strategy is an emerging area for TPC-UX practitioners in industry contexts (Tham et al., 2022; Verhulsdonck et al., 2021). In terms of the TPC-UX themes, the emergence of content strategy, in general, illustrates the increasingly complex communication strategies required for delivering content for users of digital technologies. As Verhulsdonck et al. (2021) indicate, content strategy as a general term refers to “a methodology for auditing, inventorying, developing, and managing dynamic content that can be reused to engage with users across various channels and platforms” (p. 476). The intertwining of digital content and digital technologies alongside the ever-increasing demand to personalize such content for individual users has moved content strategy firmly into the domain of UX. Verhulsdonck et al. (2021) argue that the increased focus on content strategy within TPC-UX has three broad ramifications: (1) a shift from the “craftsman model” of content development to a modular, component-based management model; (2) a need for increased data science and quantitative analysis within TPC; and (3) an orientation of user advocacy toward quantitative user metrics and intra-organizational communication (p. 480–482; see Tham et al., 2022). Interestingly, AI and design thinking, which are the other areas discussed by Verhulsdonck et al. (2021) and Tham et al. (2022), did not occur frequently enough in the keyword categories to register as significant topics in TPC-UX research. This suggests that content strategy has a greater salience within TPC-UX at present than either design thinking or artificial intelligence.

Discussion: Leveraging TPC Affordances for UX Goals

Based on this content analysis, TPC-UX appears to be a hybrid strain of TPC and UX theory and practice that prioritizes social justice, multimodality, and contextual awareness. It reveals the power-laden complexities of collaboration and communication while operating under the aegis of a social justice and post-human telos. Moreover, TPC-UX appears agnostic in terms of its emphasis on specific technologies—e.g., it grapples with web browsers (Altamirano & Stephen, 2022), mobile applications (Oppegaard, 2020), medical documentation (Melonçon, 2016, 2017), and even tombstones (Slotkin, 2020)—and appears inclined toward engaging with emergent or novel technological developments. These attunements to intersectional complexities, contextual power dynamics, and changing technologies perhaps allow TPC-UX to operate as a vanguard of user advocacy (see Butts & Jones, 2021; Getto & Flanagan, 2022; Martin et al, 2017; Williamson & Kowalewski, 2018).

TPC appears to offer several affordances to UX work in academic and professional settings. Affordance, as a design term, refers to “the real or perceived qualities of things that make them useful” (Cook, 2022, p. 51). The primary utility of TPC-UX is how it reveals the enmeshment (Barad, 2007) of the user-technology assemblage within broader networks of meaning and power and how it offers practical strategies for grappling with that enmeshment's attendant complexities. This affordance can be considered an aggregation of three features of TPC-UX, which should be understood as affordances in their own rights: TPC-UX's theoretical richness in terms of post-humanism and, perhaps more significantly, social justice; its long-standing and stable emphasis on multimodality, which perhaps stems from its relationship to rhetoric and composition; and finally, its continual focus on local contexts in which enmeshed complexities are instantiated.

Affordance 1: TPC-UX's Attunement to Networked Power Dynamics

First, the attunement to social power dynamics across human and non-human entities, as evidenced by the frequency of the theory-driven keyword category and that category's robust relationship to social justice and post-humanist paradigms, grants TPC-UX a sense of scale that goes beyond the user-technology assemblage. In UXD terminology, this affordance allows TPC-UX practitioners to advance societal eudemonic goals rather than rote, individualistic hedonic goals because it allows access to the power-laden, complex networks in which technology use occurs. It is also an affordance that ties TPC-UX explicitly to TPC's long-standing sense of itself as a user advocacy discipline (Hart-Davidson, 2012).

Post-human theories appear to offer the initial stratum of “network sense” (Mueller, 2017) upon which this affordance operates. But it is social justice that grants it a telos. As such, by examining the complexities of inter-locking intersectional oppressions within networks, TPC-UX offers practitioners avenues for user advocacy that expand the scope of conventional UX and usability concerns. For instance, Ramler's (2021) queer usability offers a more complex understanding of user-technology-context relationships than commonly employed usability heuristics (e.g., Nielsen, 1993; see Mara, 2021, p. 71–75) that can flatten analysis to UI critique. Instead of a post-development audit, queer usability functions inventively “by anticipating, predicting, and answering problems before they even exist” (Ramler, 2021, p. 346). Moreover, the theoretical grounding of queer usability—a grounding in post-structural queer theory and social justice—expands the common understandings of rote design terms like usability: “queer usability is the extent to which a product can be used by anticipated marginalized users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in an expected context of use” (Ramler, 2021, p. 346).⁹

Attunement to networked power dynamics and users’ positions within these complex contexts allows TPC-UX to offer a more holistic vantage point than other approaches to UX design. This attunement is instantiated at the methodological level. Qualitative methodologies—such as narrative inquiry (Jones, 2016), metaphor frameworks (Mara, 2018), and testimonios (Rivera, 2022)—advanced by theory-driven TPC-UX can grant UX researchers “unique sensitivity to participants’ epistemological and ontological perspectives by tapping into their lived experiences,” to use Jones’s (2017) description of narrative inquiry (p. 327). Such sensitivity is a prerequisite for effective advocacy, especially within localized contexts.

Affordance 2: Theoretically Rich Multimodality

Similarly, the theoretically rich treatment of multimodality in TPC-UX, wherein there are explicit ties to rhetorical theory, allows for nuanced examination of complex conveyance, like sea rise visualizations (Richards, 2015, 2018), UI templates (Gallagher & Holmes, 2019), and UI icons (Kascak et al., 2013). Multimodality is a topical stratum within TPC-UX scholarship that reveals its proximity to rhetoric and composition (see Sullivan & Porter, 1993) and allows it to grapple with nondiscursive yet rhetorical aspects of a technology. New materialist theories of visual rhetoric (e.g., Gries, 2015) offer an obvious place for understanding how multimodal elements within the user-technology assemblage implicate and are implicated by broader power networks. Moreover, such modalities are not limited to the visual. Emergent modalities—e.g., haptics and sonics—have been addressed in rhetorical scholarship. TPC-UX scholars and practitioners are well positioned to examine their effects on user experiences across the material, affective, and socio-political planes. Similarly, as evidenced by the emergent areas of content strategy, design thinking, and artificial intelligence in TPC-UX (Tham et al. 2022; Verhulsdonck et al. 2021), TPC-UX is well positioned to engage with emergent technological developments in a robust manner. Given that these technological developments, especially AI, will cut across modalities, TPC-UX is well positioned to offer insight about these emerging areas.

Affordance 3: Navigating Contextual Complexities

Finally, TPC-UX is an avenue of UXD that is well suited for grappling with contextual complexity. As previously discussed, this attunement to contextual complexity is apparent at the socio-political level as TPC-UX reveals the enmeshment of user-technology assemblages within broader networks of meaning and power. But TPC-UX appears context agnostic and is not limited to specific types of UX. Indeed, TPC-UX work occurs in myriad contexts—e.g., tourism assemblages (Zobel, 2013), graveyards (Slotkin, 2020), and medical settings (Melonçon, 2017)—and appears to thrive on complexity. TPC-UX's emphasis on collaborative localized design, which is attuned to networked power dynamics and societal oppressions (Acharya, 2022a; Agbozo, 2022), is a clear instance of this affordance. This affordance also appears related to TPC-UX's position as an academic pursuit: Because TPC-UX is largely unbeholden to corporate exigencies and the attendant constraints of time and capital, it is a branch of UX work that is well suited for engaging in longer-term, participatory/collaborative design practices. Centering our TPC-UX pedagogy around these ideas may help counteract the emergent quantitative enthrallment (Merry, 2016) of some new UXD practitioners (see Lanius et al., 2021).

These affordances—attunement to networked power dynamics, theoretically rich multimodality, and navigating contextual complexities—are specific ways in which TPC-UX reveals Redish's (2010) key themes of communication, collaboration, complexity, and change and St. Amant's (2016) themes of context, content, and conveyance. This content analysis has worked to illustrate that UX is still a vital site for TPC scholarship and that UX has not become an extra-disciplinary concern.

Areas of Concern for TPC-UX Scholarship

Despite TPC-UX's affordances, I contend that TPC-UX needs to address two concerns: the academic-practitioner divide and terminological ambiguity. First, the academic-practitioner divide, which is well attested in TPC scholarship (Friess & Boettger, 2021; Hayhoe, 1998; Kynell & Tebeaux, 2009; St. Amant & Melonçon, 2016, 2019]), means that these affordances might be occluded to UXD practitioners. This divide is further evidenced by the paucity of the profession broad topic within the corpus. By working to bridge the academic-practitioner divide in this domain, TPC-UX scholars can signify the affordances of a TPC framework for UX and illustrate the utility of these affordances within and without industry contexts. Collaboration is an obvious strategy for reconciling this divide (see Hayhoe, 1998, 2004), a strategy that TPC-UX scholars are well positioned to pursue. Likewise, workplace research (e.g., Rose & Tenenberg, 2018) is a useful strategy—especially given that, as Sullivan (1989) noted over three decades ago, the situation of usability and UX research undoubtedly shapes its methodological orientation, documentation procedures, and applications. The great risk here is that TPC-UX becomes wholly an academic pursuit.

Similarly, TPC-UX scholars should work to robustly differentiate between usability and user experience at the terminological level. Moving away from usability as a keyword will help TPC-UX remain current with industry and other strains of academic UX; moreover, it will help signify that much TPC-UX scholarship currently indexed via usability is, in fact, related to user experience. Given the descriptive statistics discussed earlier, user experience is becoming more common, but the half-life of usability is concerning and may make TPC-UX scholarship appear antiquated. Anecdotally, practitioner internet forums already illustrate the scope of this terminological transition—the Reddit forums r/Userexperience and r/UXDesign have approximately 108k and 115K members, respectively. The usability-focused forums r/UsabilityPorn and r/UsabilityHub have 20K and 100 members, respectively.¹⁰ In the scholarly domain, the Journal of Usability Studies has become the Journal of User Experience as of volume 17.3, which was published in May 2022. Treating usability has a component of UX rather than a wholly discreet concern would likely increase TPC-UX's alignment with UXD practitioners and other academic approaches to UX work.

Conclusion and Limitations

As is hopefully evident from this analysis of TPC-UX work between 2013 and 2022, TPC-UX is a rich scholarly domain. TPC-UX scholarship tends to emphasize product and process broad topics rather than profession and education topics. Specific topics were found to be user experience, usability, theory (post-human and social justice), multimodality, health and medicine, localization, web design, mobile applications, accessibility, and content strategy. Key affordances of TPC-UX appear to be its attunement to networked power dynamics, its theoretically rich treatment of multimodality, and its contextual agnosticism. Robustly signifying these affordances to UX practitioners and academics working within other UX paradigms is the next step in the long-standing relationship between TPC and UX. Working to reconcile the academic practitioner divide and ensuring terminological consistency are clear first steps toward such signification.

Like all scholarship, this work has limitations. At the methodological level, this work's corpus is limited to academic articles published between 2013 and 2022. The omission of other scholarly texts—e.g., monographs, conference proceedings, and edited collections—and the constrained timeframe mean that this work is not wholly representative of TPC-UX's development during the decade under examination and cannot speak to the work that precedes or follows that decade. Further integrative literature reviews of user experience topics (perhaps modeled on Acharya, 2022) would be useful for reconciling this gap, especially given the recent publication of UX and design-related collections from the WAC Clearinghouse (i.e., Crane & Cook, 2022; Tham, 2022). Similarly, interdisciplinary work that brings scholars in TPC into conversation with STEM-focused UX academics could be useful for articulating why TPC is a vital approach to UX work. For instance, a content analysis with a more robust quantitative basis that compares the topics in TPC journals with topics in the Journal of User Experience and other STEM-grounded UX publications would be fruitful for fully identifying differences between a TPC approach to UX and other approaches.

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-jtw-10.1177_00472816231191998 - Supplemental material for Toward TPC-UX: UX Topics in TPC Journals 2013–2022

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-jtw-10.1177_00472816231191998 for Toward TPC-UX: UX Topics in TPC Journals 2013–2022 by Paul Thompson Hunter in Journal of Technical Writing and Communication

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Paul Thompson Hunter

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Notes

Author biography

Paul Thompson Hunter is a PhD candidate in rhetoric and composition at Purdue University. His research areas include user experience, scientific communication, TPC pedagogy, and intra-organizational communication.

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