Purpose: This research paper explores the following phenomena that impact content strategy in technical communication (TC): 1) understudied user analysis methods that reveal users’ information seeking behavior, 2) changes in infrastructure design for innovative user research practices, 3) skill sets required by technical communicators to carry out content strategy tasks. Methods: Methodologically, the article reports findings from 19 interviews conducted with TC practitioners who hold titles such as technical writer, content strategist, information developer, information architect, and documentation manager. Results: The interviews revealed more than 13 practices/methods in which users’ interactions resulted in data that provided more information about them which impacted the design of content platforms. I classified the findings into 4 main categories of users’ interactions that hold valuable insights about users’ information consumption behavior. These insights that can be used to make informed content strategy decisions are lost if the data is not carefully processed. Conclusion: This paper demonstrates how user interactions can inform research on content strategy in TC and how it impacts the processes of users, as well as the impacts on existing roles of technical communicators. I argue that we need to be more purposeful about analyzing users’ interactions that produce data and design infrastructures to support interactions as part of an organization’s content strategy goals. My future work will focus on how issues such as privacy, surveillance, and incentivization can be handled in situations where users’ information is used for audience analysis purposes.

Purpose: This teaching case examines challenges in developing technical communication students as organizational leaders managing content strategy through analysis of a graduate course incorporating a client project. Method: Forty-five graduate students enrolled in a content strategy course conducted content audits and assessments for six clients. Their final strategic roadmap reports were analyzed to determine their aptitude for aligning content strategies with business goals. Results: While students adeptly identified technical content quality issues, the majority struggled to connect these to business implications. A minority of students explicitly linked their strategic recommendations to business metrics, such as revenue growth. This outcome suggests a deficiency in achieving the course’s intent to instill a business-oriented approach to content strategy. Conclusion: The case identifies several challenges, including client maturity levels, the intricacy of business contexts, and the ambitious scope of the course’s objectives. Proposed enhancements involve restructuring client interaction, integrating more industry expertise, focusing the project’s reporting component, and refining the course’s aims. These measures aim to strengthen the strategic business thinking and leadership capabilities of technical communication students.

Purpose: Our article interrogates mobile ridesharing apps as sites where digital interfaces, cultural practices, and rhetorical discourses intersect. We establish counter- histories of mobile ridesharing apps and conduct a critical interface analysis of select apps to demonstrate how innovative interfaces imagine a universal user while culturally specific apps make space for community-based user experience (CBX). Method: This article brings together Haas' digital cultural rhetorics (DCR) framework with Brock's critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA) to zoom in on the cultural ideologies, form, and function of mobile ridesharing apps. Results: Our analysis highlights how developers of culturally specific apps inscribe and promote an ethos of community for users marginalized by Western ideologies regarding race, gender, and sexuality. We show that, despite working in prescribed programming and coding structures, these app developers take advantage of forms and functions to amplify their cultural significance. Conclusion: Rhetoric, technical communication, and UX researchers and practitioners should look to culturally specific mobile ridesharing apps as exemplars for designing technologies that center and acknowledge multiply-marginalized communities and their DCR practices. We insist CBX be part of interface design.

Purpose: Technical communication (tech comm) and marketing communication (marcomm) are converging in business-to-consumer (B2C) contexts. Convergent videos integrate practices from both genres to address ever-changing digital audiences. In this paper, we review available literature and analyze tech comm and marcomm social media videos to demonstrate traditional genre conventions. We then analyze a select couple of convergent social media videos to delineate genre conventions across genres. We end by considering four unique convergent strategies that these videos used in combining elements of the tech comm and marcomm genres. Methods: We selected several social media videos produced by large home improvement brands to analyze the generic practices they employ in relation to accepted best practices in the literature from scholars in tech comm and marcomm. We then analyze videos that fit neither genre in light of recent publications by Adobe discussing genre convergence and note several distinct genre practices that can be ascribed to convergent videos. Results: We find that convergent characteristics are distinct from tech comm and marcomm. The brands employ convergent practices in some social media videos that blend genre conventions from tech comm and marcomm video production.Specifically, we identify four ways that these genres converge: using technical tasks as marketing opportunities, balancing corporate branding with mundane user ethos, layering content pathways across the interface, and capturing attention with relevance. Conclusion: Convergence represents a new genre in that it purposefully attempts to engage users across the product lifecycle in single videos. This approach is a departure from traditional marcomm and tech comm video production. Though limited in scope, this analysis provides examples of how convergent videos attempt to achieve this goal. We end by noting our limitations and offering suggestions for future research.

Purpose: State historical commissions tend to avoid erecting historical marker texts (HMTs), memorials, or monuments that document violence towards Black and brown individuals. The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) uses a series of tactics to circumvent local historical commissions to memorialize victims of lynching. Methods: In this study, we use the EJI's Community Remembrance Project (CRP), an informational handbook for community activists, as our data set. We apply the 4Rs (Walton, Moore, & Jones, 2019) and tactical technical communication in our analysis of the Community Remembrance Project and argue that the document functions as a coalitional, truth-telling tactic to redress inequalities in public memory. Results: We found that the EJI's CRP efforts with the Historical Marker Project clearly demonstrate how coalitions can tactically intervene in racist systems—like historical commissions that reject truth-telling efforts—by creating a different path for historical markers to be erected in communities. Conclusion: We argue that public memory texts often reinforce racism by avoiding topics like racial terror lynching and that these omissions have cultural and material consequences on communities. We contend that technical communicators can intervene in public memory systems and promote truth-telling through coalitional approaches to community activism.

Purpose: Extended reality (XR) is an umbrella term for the many ways that we can now design 3D, interactive, and real-time environments as in combining virtual and real elements, and experience immersion in a completely virtual reality (VR). The use of XR is increasing in popularity across a range of industries. Although researchers are becoming increasingly interested in the benefits and challenges of using XR to convey technical instructions, more comprehensive research is required. I aim to address this need in the present article by introducing an affordance model of Technical Instructions in Extended Reality, the TIER model. Two earlier categorizations, the affordances of technical instructions, and the phases of data handling in XR, formed the point of departure for this article. The analysis utilized a four-category model of affordances by Rantakokko and Nuopponen (2019) that comprised: accessing, finding, understanding, and relying on. Data handling in XR drew on a phase-based model by Rantakokko (2022) featuring: collection, processing, storage, transfer, combining, and presentation. Methods:The two sets of categorizations were combined into a holistic model with an iterative process in order to offer a tool for analyzing and describing the possibilities and challenges that XR brings to designing technical instructions. The iterative process was conducted by adding examples from existing research into matrix tables to understand how the affordances of technical instructions and the phases of data handling in XR are connected. Results: The TIER model is introduced with examples to illustrate how it can be used to view every phase of XR data handling in terms of the affordances of technical instructions based on the laws, regulations, principles of good guidance, and the design process. Conclusion: The TIER model can be used as a tool for an organized, step-by-step design process as well as testing XR-based technical instructions to ensure that the features of XR support the intended affordances of technical instructions. technical instructions, affordances, extended reality, mixed reality,

Purpose: This article explores the role of technical communicators during disaster response and provides suggestions to practitioners about how to incorporate social justice-oriented language, culture, and context-specific crisis communication during disasters.<br/> Method: This is a mixed-methods study that includes a) narrative inquiry and b) social network analysis. The study is based on two different disasters: the April 2015 Nepal Earthquake and Hurricane Maria of 2017. I used narrative inquiry with 28 participants who represented government, non-governmental agencies, community organizers, activists, and students for the qualitative study portion of my research. For the social network analysis portion, I analyzed approximately 50 million tweets that were posted during the first week after both disasters. In this article, I showcased a word frequency display that focuses on the words uttered and written in response to the calamities.<br/> Results: Based on this method, I found that there were two different types of communication that happened during these two disasters: organizational communication and crisis publics communication, which was mediated by people from all walks of life.<br/> Conclusion: Technical communicators and publics (local or non-experts) who take up the role of technical communicators during a disaster can play an important role in providing accurate information and dispelling misinformation by working closely with the experts, scientists, journalists, and other officials.

Purpose:What can technical communicators learn from a seemingly swank event such as the Reddit Wall Street Bets and GameStop (WSB-GME) saga? In this article, we identify tactical organizing in online spaces as a complex convergence of social uptake and socialized information afforded by news sharing and mass user interactions in digital platforms.<br/>Methods:We employed a case study methodology that combined positivist and interpretive perspectives toward a developing event. We curated a series of Reddit posts pertaining to the WSB-GME saga and applied critical discourse analysis with a focus on the tactical and multimodal elements in these posts to identify their professional and theoretical implications.<br/>Results:We found the networked social mania to be driven by a discourse founded on a common goal and a shared leadership that emerges from vertical and horizontal community building. While technology assumes an agentive role in facilitating tactical efforts, it can also create an information bubble, where users may be gripped by a cult-like devotion for their heroes and desire to be part of the latest trends, thereby making risky financial bets.<br/>Conclusion:The WSB-GME saga illustrated implications for tactical technical communication as well as the impact of networked interactions on democratization of information, consumer engagement, and the rhetoric of finance.

Since 2004, the number of children online has increased 18%, compared with a 10% increase in total users. Not only do children represent a growing segment of Internet users, much of what they do online has a specific purpose: education. To help technical communicators create educational Web sites for children, we offer a set of guidelines to direct the design process. Nine children participated in a usability test of the CARES Playground, an educational Web site geared toward 7- to 9-year-olds. The site was designed by a group of graduate students in professional writing based on a review of the (admittedly limited) literature dealing with designing Web sites for children. This paper matches common themes from existing literature to the results of the usability tests. Since all the information on designing Web sites for children emerged from the literature of designing Web sites for adults, the themes of navigation, appearance, and content are not unfamiliar. However, the interpretation of those common issues for children-as well as the children's reaction to them-may be surprising. Technical communicators need to be conscious and deliberate when designing Web sites for children. To ensure that educational Web sites are able to meet their learning goals, careful consideration of children's developmental abilities and Web preferences must be considered. We present several guidelines as a starting point, though further research is needed to confirm and expand upon them.