Wicked, Incomplete, and Uncertain: User Support in the Wild and the Role of Technical Communication - Softcover

Swarts, Jason

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1607327619 ISBN 13: 9781607327615

Verlag: Utah State University Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Technology users are compulsive integrators, hybridizers, and bricoleurs, whose unpredictable applications and innovations create a challenging task for support-documentation writers. In Wicked, Incomplete, and Uncertain, Jason Swarts shows how to document technologies that may hybridize into forms that not even their designers would have anticipated and offers insight into the evolving role of a technical writer in an age of increasing user reliance on YouTube tutorials, message boards, and other resources for guidance.
 
Technical writers traditionally create large volumes of idealized tasks and procedures in help documentation, but this is no longer the only approach, or even the best approach. Shifting responsibility for user support to users via crowdsourcing is a risky alternative. Just as with other mass-collaborative enterprises, contributors to a forum may not be aware of the kind of knowledge they are creating or how their contributions connect with those made by others. Wicked, Incomplete, and Uncertain describes the kinds of writing and help practices in which user forums engage, why users seem to find these forums credible and appealing, and what companies can learn about building user communities to support this form of assistance.
 
Through investigation of user-forum activities, Swarts identifies a new set of contributions that technical communicators can make—not only by creating content but also by curating content, shaping conversations, feeding information back into the user community, and opening channels of discovery and knowledge creation that can speak to users and software developers alike

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jason Swarts is professor of English at North Carolina State University, specializing in the field of Technical Communication. He is a core faculty member in NC State’s MS program in Technical and Scientific Communication and in the Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media PhD program. His work has received numerous awards, including the 2009 NCTE Award for Best Book in Technical or Scientific Communication.
 

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Wicked, Incomplete, and Uncertain

User Support in the Wild and the Role of Technical Communication

By Jason Swarts

University Press of Colorado

Copyright © 2018 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-60732-761-5

Contents

1 The Exigencies and Forms of Technical Communication, 
2 Task Shift: Changes in the Object of Documentation, 
3 Shifted Tasks and Shifted Problems: The Problem of Wicked and Tame Problems, 
4 Credibility and User Interaction: The Challenge of Decentered Expertise, 
5 A Survey of Action-Based Proto-Genres of Help, 
6 The Role of Technical Communication, 
References, 
About the Author, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

THE EXIGENCIES AND FORMS OF TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION

A fundamental challenge of organized human labor is to coordinate with others on both the concept and object of work. To assist with that coordination, we have constructed a bewilderingly large and complex array of supporting technologies and texts that orient us to our work. Out of this context, the profession of technical communication has emerged, to help accommodate technologies and texts to our situated uses. Documentation including technical manuals, procedures, and instructions has emerged mushroom-like around new technologies, as they have since the origins of the field. What has changed about technological development since the first technical manual, however, is the speed of technological development and iteration, the capacity for user customization, and the extent to which technologies have become integral to daily work. The changes are reflected in the form and content of documentation, and comparing technical manuals from the early prehistory of the field of technical communication to today reveals differences in approaches that tell of these changes in our access to and use of technology. Also reflected are changes in the rhetorical situations that we address with technology. Not only have our tasks changed, but also the ways technologies portray those tasks to us.

It would seem that technical manuals have an increasingly important role to play, mediating access to our technologies and, through them, to our work and each other. Still, few people read manuals today and the genre itself seems increasingly out of time. The reasons are complicated. Users have not become more universally adept at learning and using new technologies, as the idea of the "digital native" would have us believe. We still need help, but increasingly we are ignoring manuals because our purposes have grown beyond what manuals are capable of addressing. This book offers a consideration of what users need from technical communicators, which turns out to be much more than thorough knowledge of a technology, presented with scrupulous attention to the formal conventions of task-oriented manuals. Generating raw help content has always been something that technical communicators do, but the challenge today is to facilitate a manner by which users can interact with that content. Technical communication has always been about supplying thorough, useful, and usable content about a technology, and it still is, but documentation today may be less about generating content than it used to be. The change hinges on how we think about technologies and how we expect technical documentation to accommodate those technologies to users. As our technologies have become more ubiquitous, integrative, customizable, and connectable, they have become more difficult to document, largely because iterations of a technology vary by user, as do the configurations of technological systems, the "functional organs," that users rely on to mediate their work (Kaptelinin 1996, 50). Furthermore, the problems that shape the development of technologies defy neat categorization and description as guides for modeling and documenting user interaction.

By looking at the challenge of knowledge creation posed by rapid changes in technology and by the ways that tasks require users to rely on adaptive combinations of technologies to get work done, we can begin to see the problems with knowledge creation which have prompted this book.

Writing in 1999 about the need for designers to consider how technologies fit users' lives, Donald Norman sketched out a lifecycle of technology development. Early on, there is a gulf between what the technology is capable of doing and what early adopters hope it is capable of doing. Where the technology meets actual users, a gap forms between the technology's capabilities and the users' expectations, assuming that users encounter the technology in a context where the uses of the technology are not stringently managed. For many users of computer software, tasks grow larger than the software design is meant to support, leading to new developments in the software. Technologies (like software) continue to develop to a point where the users' needs, having remained the same, are met by the capabilities of the technology; it is a balance at which the technology does all that the users hope (Norman 1999, 32). Technical communication has traditionally helped to bridge this gap between what the technology is capable of doing and what users want it to do. When those things are the same, the gap is easily spanned. Beyond this moment, the technology continues to develop, improving efficiency, effectiveness, and ease of use but does little to build on its basic operation.

At this point, there is a turn as users begin to adapt the technology socially. They integrate it with other practices; they extend it; they customize it; they network it with other technologies. This is not to say that users no longer need documentation and support, but rather that the technology they need support using has grown and incorporated more technologies into it. The technologies hybridize and become something more than the designers or documenters can anticipate. Technologies stop being standalone products and become parts of technological systems. For example, technologies like graphics editing software become part of a collection of tools for working on industrial design projects. Email clients become parts of project management tools. Just as important is that documentation needs change as well. As the tasks that users engage in with these technological systems go beyond simple interaction and dialogue with an interface, the focus shifts away from support to integration into a broader network of technological and human actors.

At the heart of this book is the point that these changes in technologies and our relationships to them are creating new demands for knowledge that are challenging our practices of knowledge creation achieved through traditional technical communication genres. At the same time, these demands are also opening up opportunities to redistribute the work of technical communication and reveal opportunities for new kinds of knowledge creation that technical communicators are perfectly able to deliver. In taking up this point, my purpose is to describe this redistribution of knowledge creation, understand why it is happening, and then look at the new kinds of knowledge creation demands that result. This period of transformational redistribution is not a bleak period in which the value of technical communication is diminished, but is instead a period in which that work is repositioned and expanded. Just as the field has undergone radical changes as our audiences and purposes have shifted, the field is now undergoing a similar change as our objects of knowledge creations are changing.

In corporate settings, a...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Utah State University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1607327619
• ISBN 13: 9781607327615
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 163
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar