User-centered design (UCD) and technical communication: The inevitable marriage
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As teachers of technical communication, we have come to understand and realize the importance of User-Centered Design (UCD) principles required in and applied to technical communication. With the technical communication field changing so rapidly, this particular issue is of crucial importance; this issue is particularly acute within the confines of the self-service society where users are often thrust into learning products and services with no support. Users increasingly demand products and services that they can understand with little outside help; interactions should be intuitive and experiences satisfying rather than frustrating. With this shift, technical communicators are increasingly expected to be true end-user advocates and participate earlier in the product life-cycle development. This workshop will help practitioners understand UCD, rapidly iterate designs, and provide educators with approaches that engage and prepare students (and teachers). Failure to adapt these methods quickly in both the classroom and the profession will invariably lead to the field's further decline and likely extinction as we currently understand it.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.090 | 0.076 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.041 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.025 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".