The UX Designer’s Place in the Ensemble: Directing the Vision

What does directing have to do with creating a user interface design? Well, we know a director is responsible for the strategic vision of creative work. That’s a given. But, did you know he is also responsible for ensuring a successful outcome that both meets his vision and is in line with the producer’s desires and budget? To make that happen, a director works with the cast, crew, costume and set designers, and everyone else who contributes to a successful theatrical production to pull together a cohesive product, without losing site of his vision. It’s a complicated job.

Lepore, Traci. UXmatters (2008). Articles>User Experience>Collaboration>Project Management

Setting Priorities

Nearly every company I’ve worked with since becoming a web professional six years ago has lacked an efficient way to decide which things to do first. Put 10 people into a room for an hour, and they’ll surely come up with a wish list a mile long.

Fraser, Janice. Adaptive Path (2002). Articles>Web Design>Project Management>Collaboration

The Pendulum Returns: Unifying the Online Presence of Decentralized Organizations

A number of smart businesses are realizing that the organizational characteristics that lead to their successes — such as agility, decentralized decision making, and fast growth — have made their Web sites unworkable through poor development processes and inconsistent user experiences. This frustrates any attempt by visitors to find meaningful information.

Merholtz, Peter. Adaptive Path (2002). Articles>Collaboration>Organizational Communication>Online

"So What Shall We Talk About": Openings and Closings in Chat-Based Virtual Meetings    

Using the framework of conversation analysis, the author examines the structure of interaction in computer-mediated team meetings, focusing on the openings and closings of the team's four virtual meetings. The author describes how the medium, quasisynchronous chat (QSC), disrupts the temporal flow of conversation and makes beginning and ending these informally structured meetings difficult. The author finds that the team, as a result, evolved a two-stage process for both opening and closing the meetings, which allowed them to make consistent use of certain linguistic and conversational devices to mark possible transition points for openings and closings. The author discusses how these virtual meetings compare to face-to-face interactions and some possible implications for the use of QSC for virtual team meetings.

Markman, Kris M. JBC (2009). Articles>Collaboration>Online>Teleconferencing

Staging a Team Performance    

Drawing on insights from Goffman's dramaturgical approach to interaction, this article demonstrates how meetings are team performances routinely concerned with sustaining or challenging interpretations of power relations. The data for this article were collected at a British embassy, relying on participant observation, audio recordings of weekly gatherings of Heads of Section, and interviews with the people that attended the meeting. The analysis focuses on the double role behavior of the Ambassador as the director and central player of a team performance and the conflicting ideologies these shifting roles entail.

Van Praet, Ellen. JBC (2009). Articles>Business Communication>Collaboration>Case Studies

Squaring the Learning Circle: Cross-Classroom Collaborations and the Impact of Audience on Student Outcomes in Professional Writing    

Student compositions traditionally are written for the teacher. Yet instructors of professional communication genres have discovered that students' motivation may be enhanced when they write assignments for audiences of peers within the classroom or professionals outside the campus. Yet client-based projects require writing students who have never yet written for an external audience to make a leap beyond the classroom. To bridge the gap between writing for classroom peers and writing for professional clients, this article describes a third and intermediate choice of audience, namely, external peers in cross-classroom collaborations that occur via telecommunication. The author places this intermediate-audience strategy within the larger conversation about the impact of audience on student writing outcomes, applies the strategy to professional writing pedagogy, and reports the results of a small pilot study that provide some preliminary support for the strategy.

Ward, Mark. Journal of Business and Technical Communication (2009). Articles>Education>Business Communication>Collaboration

Collective Form: An Exploration of Large-Group Writing 1998 (Outstanding Researcher Lecture)    

Whether a collective mind forms in large-group writing in the workplace is the focus of this article originally given as the 1998 ABC Outstanding Researcher Lec ture. This article is based on a five-year ethnographic study that describes and analyzes a three-month group writing process that created a computer service-level agreement, involving a 20-person cross-functional core more than 100 other collab orators at a major corporation. The article discusses "collective form" in two senses: First, a document's evolving form or superstructure produced a collective schema that allowed the group through a process of equilibration (Piaget, 1981) to adapt outsider boilerplate into a more situated general model and then into a sit uated document. Second, architectural forms motivated and molded group activity in several ways. To combat group apathy, the leaders appropriated an in-demand meeting room for the project, positioning the project as high-status in the center of the workflow. Group leaders prominently displayed a task completion check-off chart that, in a downsizing environment, helped both to coordinate group activity and to encourage completion.

Cross, Geoffrey A. JBC (2000). Articles>Collaboration>Ethnographies>Cognitive Psychology

When Trust Becomes a Characteristic Flaw in a Project

As hard as it may seem, lesson one of technical writing is to break the rules and contact the end user. Conduct a mini-ethnography. Sit with the users. Call them on the phone. Send them emails. Do not let it get to the point where you feel you must go through the PM to communicate with the end user. As hard and uncomfortable as it may be, the consequences of not talking to the end user can be crippling to your help.

Johnson, Tom H. I'd Rather Be Writing (2008). Articles>Project Management>Collaboration>Technical Writing

Project Management, Critical Praxis, and Process-Oriented Approach to Teamwork    

To help alleviate issues of free-riding and conflicts in team projects, this study proposes the systematic incorporation of project management methods to introduce a process-oriented approach to and a critical praxis in team projects. We examined how the systematic use of project management methods influenced students' performance in team projects. The findings demonstrate that such an approach enables the documentation and evaluation of and reflection on both individual and team work. Our findings indicate that project management tools enhance team member accountability and help reduce free-riding.

Ding, Huiling and Xin Ding. Business Communication Quarterly (2008). Articles>Project Management>Collaboration>Workflow

Using Critical Praxis to Understand and Teach Teamwork    

The authors pursue three aims in this article. The first is to underscore critical praxis as an especially valuable approach to understanding and enabling teamwork. The second is to offer four dimensions of teamwork—vision, roles, processes, and relationships— as salient areas to interrogate using critical praxis. The third aim is to consider the implications and methods for teaching teamwork in the classroom context. In the process of doing so, the authors highlight limitations of prevailing theoretical approaches and note changes in their own practice of teaching and facilitating teamwork that have occurred through a commitment to critical praxis.

Seibold, David R. and Paul Kang. Business Communication Quarterly (2008). Articles>Education>Collaboration

Facilitating Better Teamwork: Analyzing the Challenges and Strategies of Classroom-Based Collaboration    

To help students develop teamwork skills, teachers should be aware of the strategies students already employ to assert authority and manage conflict. Researchers studying engineering students have identified two such approaches: transfer-of-knowledge sequences, in which students emulate teacher and pupil roles; and collaborative sequences, in which students use circular talk to reach consensus. As demonstrated in this article, these strategies are also used by students in professional communication courses. The second half of this article provides specific suggestions for designing team assignments, interacting effectively with student teams, and developing evaluations that value the process of teamwork.

Fredrick, Terri A. Business Communication Quarterly (2008). Articles>Education>Collaboration

Teamwork Through Team Building: Face-to-Face to Online    

This article describes the ways the authors incorporated team-building activities into our online business writing courses by interrogating the ways that kinesthetic learning translates into the electronic realm. The authors review foundational theories of team building, including Cog's Ladder and Tuckman's Stages, and offer sample exercises they have converted. The authors show how the medium affects the exercises, how the choices made as teachers affect the exercises, and how they adjusted to meet the needs of their students. The authors argue that teamwork most successfully occurs after team building, and too often this team building is lacking in online environments.

Staggers, Julie, Susan Garcia and Ed Nagelhout. Business Communication Quarterly (2008). Articles>Education>Business Communication>Collaboration

Team Attributes, Processes, and Values: a Pedagogical Framework    

This article proposes a pedagogical framework to help students analyze their group and team interactions. Intersecting five fundamental group attributes (group size, group goal, group member interdependence, group structure, and group identity) with three overarching group processes (leadership, decision making, and conflict management) creates an analytical tool for the examination of team interaction. Furthermore, each group attribute/group process intersection encourages analytical questions targeting assumptions, values, and ethical positions embedded within the group. One advantage of this heuristic device is that it weds team member behaviors with the values members espouse and enact during team interactions. Pedagogical considerations are also discussed.

Keyton, Joann and Stephenson J. Beck. Business Communication Quarterly (2008). Articles>Education>Collaboration

COMMUNEcating in the Spaces In-Between    

This essay describes the authors' efforts to engage disciplinary calls for greater diversity through the construction of an international online community and conference, COMMUNEcation. They describe the commitments and goals of the community and conference, the construction of the COMMUNEcating space, and their encounters with disciplinary, geographically, and linguistically diverse scholars in their mutual exploration of global and organizing practices in their local contexts. The conference contributions and conversations prompted the authors to ask three salient questions around scholarly understandings of the Other and Othering practices of organizing and communicating across the globe—Where is the Other? Who is the Other? and What is the Other? The second half of the essay discusses these questions in detail and concludes with the authors' reflections on creating "spaces inbetween" through technology and an introduction to the multiauthored collaborative essay and conference product from the Scholars of the COMMUNEcation Network that follows.

Nelson-Marsh, Natalie, Kirsten J. Broadfoot and Debashish Munshi. Management Communication Quarterly (2008). Articles>Collaboration>Online>Professionalism

Agile Usability

RITE differs from a “traditional” usability test by emphasizing extremely rapid changes and verification of the effectiveness of these changes. Specifically, practitioners make changes to the UI (prototype or application) as soon as the problem is found and the solution spotted. Changes such renaming buttons, changing the text of menu items often happen before another participant arrives. More complicated, but obvious changes are made as rapidly as possible. This way the change can be tested as quickly as possible.

Levison, Mark. InfoQ (2008). Articles>Usability>Collaboration>Agile

Pasting Tracked Changes

There are only three possible behaviors when pasting tracked changes. The one you get depends on whether Track Changes is on or off in both the document you copied from [source] and the document you are pasting into [destination].

Microsoft (2008). Articles>Word Processing>Collaboration>Microsoft Word

A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy

We've had social software for 40 years at most, dated from the Plato BBS system, and we've only had 10 years or so of widespread availability, so we're just finding out what works. We're still learning how to make these kinds of things.

Shirky, Clay. Shirky.com (2003). Articles>Collaboration>Online>Social Networking

Flexible Fuel: Educating the Client on Information Architecture

Information architecture (IA) means so much to our projects, from setting requirements to establishing the baseline layout for our design and development teams. But what does it mean to your clients? Do they see the value in IA? What happens when they change their minds? Can IA help manage the change control process? More than ever, we must ensure that our clients find value in and embrace IA—and it’s is our job to educate them. If we want our customers to embrace IA, we must help them understand why we need it.

LaFerriere, Keith. List Apart, A (2008). Articles>Information Design>Collaboration>Web Design

Things I Learned the Hard Way: Ignore the Content

The next time someone complains to you, try to ignore the content of the complaint and address the emotion behind it instead. You’ll be amazed how quickly you can convert the haters to lovers and make your site better at the same time.

Powazek, Derek. Powazek.com (2009). Articles>Collaboration>Audience Analysis

Conversing Well Across Channels

Whether you call it cross-channel experience or multichannel experience, the reality is that customers interact with companies through more than one channel, so it’s important for us to understand cross-channel customer behavior.

Jones, Colleen. UXmatters (2009). Articles>Communication>Collaboration>User Experience

Save the Touchy-Feely for the Redwoods

When you lay your feelings out to people, it can be cathartic for you, but it also places a weight on those around you. Learning when, where, and how, to talk to someone about your feelings is tricky. Sometimes it’s okay, and sometimes it’s not.

Powazek, Derek. Powazek.com (2009). Articles>Business Communication>Collaboration>Emotions

The UX Customer Experience: Communicating Effectively with Stakeholders and Clients

Effective communication with stakeholders and clients is critical to the design process itself, but this is not a topic we often address, because, at first glance, it doesn’t appear to contribute directly to our primary goals, which are to create, build, and ship digital products. Certainly, as an industry, we are attuned to client service in a general sense, but there’s no doubt that methods of UX customer communication, education, and collaboration are sometimes overlooked and underutilized aspects of the design process. We can and should treat the elements of stakeholder and client communication as a kind of user experience. And we should design this experience for our UX customers so far as it’s possible to do so.

Follett, Jonathan. UXmatters (2009). Articles>User Experience>Collaboration

Critique: Collaborative Reviewing of XML Documents

Critique is the first example of a new approach to contextual collaboration: Documentspaces. Documentspaces are places within a document in which teams can meet and work, synchronously or asynchronously, to create, review, and publish content.

Prescod, Paul. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Collaboration>Standards>XML

Off Site Reviews: Six Ways to Exchange Edits

Coordinating a document review can be a tedious process. However, the task is even more difficult when reviewers work in another location and can't quickly exchange comments via paper. Fortunately, technology is presenting writers with new options for handling off-site reviews.

HelpScribe (2009). Articles>Collaboration>Editing>Online

How To Get More Out of Google Docs

Part of the appeal of Google's suite of web-based productivity applications is the integration between them -- Gmail can send events to Google Calendar, Calendar sends reminders and note to Gmail and so on. Lately Google has extended that integration to make working with Google Docs a little bit easier.

Wired (2009). Articles>Word Processing>Software>Collaboration