Applying Usability and User Experience within Academic Contexts: Why Progress Remains Slow

ABSTRACT

In his 2013 article “Slow Ideas,” Harvard professor and MacArthur fellow Atul Gawande discusses two forms of disciplinary change. He describes two surgical innovations from the mid-19^th century, and traces why one (anesthesia) was easily and rapidly adopted, whereas the other (antiseptic) was accepted only slowly, over the course of decades. This happened because the more significant innovation (antiseptic) required a fundamental redefinition of the profession of surgery, including a significant rethinking of the field’s methods and values. Instead of “warriors against disease,” surgeons needed to become scrupulously sterile practitioners of cleanliness—and many, advanced in their careers, resisted such a change. This article contents that usability and user experience represent a similarly slow change in the field of techncial communication, and that we are still in the midst of transformations within our discipline which may require similar redefinition of scholarly work within this field.

KEYWORDS:

• Scholarship
• technical communication
• usability

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Geoffrey Sauer

Geoffrey Sauer is an associate professor in Rhetoric and Professional Communication at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. He has worked extensively in electronic scholarship, particularly with EServer.org, and researches both technical communication and the history of publishing.