Guiseppe Getto

Designing globally, working locally: using personas to develop online communication products for international users

Extending digital products and services to global markets requires a communication design approach that considers the needs of international (e.g. non-U.S.) users. The challenge becomes developing an approach that works effectively. The concept of personas, as applied in user experience design (UX), can offer an effective solution to this situation. This article examines how this idea of personas can expand communication design practices to include users form other cultures.

Teaching UX: designing programs to train the next generation of UX experts

This experience report describes core values and approaches to teaching and developing programs in User Experience (UX). What binds these values and approaches together is a deep engagement with ongoing trends and best practices in the field of UX over the past several decades. Examples offered are contextually embedded, yet each expression is consistent with underlying core competencies gleaned from a ten-plus year history of teaching and practicing UX design, information architecture and information design, visual rhetoric, ethics, and usability in the technical communication classroom. The best practices we articulate below are applicable in the context of corporate training, team building and preparation, and consulting, in addition to academic contexts.

Toward a Model of UX Education: Training UX Designers Within the Academy

Problem: Increased demand for user experience (UX) designers requires new approaches to teaching and training the next generation of these professionals. We present a model for building educational programs within academia that train job-ready designers. Key concepts: To be successful, this model necessitates a working knowledge of the UX process, the systematic use of sound principles during the design of digital products and services. The model also requires a pedagogical approach that puts learners in a position to solve real problems and that treats them as apprentices on their way to competency. Key lessons: Academic institutions clearly have parts to play in producing job-ready UX designers, but barriers exist to doing so, including access to adequate training in UX best practices. To overcome these barriers, we provide tips for understanding core UX competencies, developing partnerships with UX practitioners, and deploying UX education courses and programs. Implications: Though the barriers to producing sufficient numbers of well-trained UX designers are significant, the combined ingenuity of devoted professionals in both academia and industry can be leveraged to create sound educational opportunities for UX learners from all walks of life.

Content Strategy Service-Learning Partnerships with Nonprofit Organizations: A Guiding Heuristic and Overview of Deliverables

In this experience report, we describe a three-step heuristic to guide educators as they design content-strategy focused service-learning partnerships with nonprofit organizations. The heuristic moves students along an arc from conducting research to making recommendations. Each of the three heuristic steps also suggests an array of deliverables---many of them described in this report---that might be produced in the course of a partnership.

Managing Experiences: Utilizing User Experience Design UX as an Agile Methodology for Teaching Project Management

The popularity of agile frameworks for project management within a variety of professions necessitates new approaches to teaching project management. At the same time, the increased pervasiveness of digital technologies means that more and more projects will relate closely to the development of user experiences UX. To connect these two interests project management and UX, in the following article the author develops an agile methodology for teaching project management. This methodology utilizes the UX Process and related concepts e.g., preliminary research, prototyping, usability testing, and maintenance to argue that traditional components of projects-strategies, teams, clients, deliverables, timelines, and benchmarks-must be refashioned into ultra-flexible heuristics that can be adapted to a variety of contingencies.

Helping content: a three-part approach to content strategy with nonprofits

Nonprofits must reach a variety of community audiences to sustain their organizations, and these audiences include potential volunteers, donors, and clients. With the increasing availability of open-source, freely available, and inexpensive communication technologies, many nonprofits can now develop a robust web presence that targets a variety of audiences via a variety of channels. In this article, we present a three-part heuristic to help nonprofits better manage digital content. This heuristic is comprised of developing audience awareness and interaction, making use of emerging technologies, and building sustainable partnerships. Using a project designed to help a homeless shelter improve its content strategy, we explore this heuristic and its implications for helping technical and professional communicators improve local nonprofit digital capacities.

Doing UX: A Workflow for Teaching and Training

In this interactive poster, I describe methods for introducing professionals from any background to key UX knowledge-making practices (ways); deliverables and concepts that professionals new to UX should be able to create (things); and means of sustaining this work within organizations (impact). This workflow has been developed through my own work teaching classes in UX within higher education, and through collaboration with UX training programs in industry.

Networked knowledges: student collaborative digital composing as communicative action

As Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) utilized in workplaces, classrooms, and community organizations continue to proliferate, it follows that the kinds of knowledge necessary to assemble those technologies in order to engage in effective professional communication are becoming increasingly complex. This article details a study conducted of two student teams engaged in a service-learning class in which they were tasked with producing high-quality digital products---a mini-documentary and a simple, but interactive website---for client organizations---an art classroom in a local public school and a mentoring initiative within a local non-profit. The main findings of this study are that students mobilized a variety of resources and created a flexible network of technologies, knowledges, people, and modes of communication in order to address issues pertinent to their clients. In addition, I argue that the most important resource students mobilized was knowledge itself, indicating that one of the most important aspects of digital composing may be in-depth, practical knowledge of technologies, modes, and the genres they involve. Ultimately, the implications of this limited, classroom-based case study are that a situated understanding of how to assemble knowledges for the effective design of communication within a given communication infrastructure may be more important than access to the most cutting-edge modes and technologies, especially when working with resource-poor organizational clients.

A Prototype Theory for Content Strategy Education: Training Content Strategists Within the Academy

Technical communicators are increasingly utilizing content-focused technologies such as content management systems and component-based information architectures in their daily work to deliver technical content to non-specialist audiences. In the wake of this turn, content strategy becomes an important element of technical communication curricula as students and emerging professionals struggle to master new tools and best practices. Stemming from experiences teaching content strategy to undergraduate students, graduate students, and industry professionals, I present a prototype theory for content strategy education within the academy. The goal of the theory is to meld best practices gleaned from previous scholarship within the field of technical and professional sommunication, how-to books and articles from industry practitioners, and my own experience teaching content strategy.

Helping communication: what non-profits need from content strategists

Contemporary non-profit organizations must reach a variety of audiences in order to sustain themselves, and must compel these audiences to take action on behalf of a specific cause. At the same time, digital communication is becoming an essential venue for reaching new audiences. Past research has indicated that non-profit professionals often lack the necessary training and expertise to leverage digital technologies for effective communication. This report of preliminary research findings is based on an ongoing Participatory Action Research (PAR) project to learn about, and help improve, non-profit content strategy in the community of Greenville, NC. The project included a series of focus groups with representatives of thirteen different organizations. Ultimately, I provide heuristics gleaned from the initial findings of this study and my ten years of working with non-profits to help improve their web presence and content strategy.