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  Partner: UNT College of Arts and Sciences
 Department: Linguistics and Technical Communications
 Decade: 2000-2009
 Collection: UNT Scholarly Works
[Review] Communications and Management at Work

[Review] Communications and Management at Work

Date: 2008
Creator: Friess, Erin
Description: This book review discusses 'Communication and Management at Work' by Thomas Klikauer. The book, intended primarily for scholars of management, business, and organizational communication, invokes the theories of Kant, Habermas, Orwell, and Marx to assess at a macro level the historical and contemporary relationships between communication and control in the workplace.
Contributing Partner: UNT College of Arts and Sciences
Defending Design Decisions With Usability Evidence: A Case Study

Defending Design Decisions With Usability Evidence: A Case Study

Date: 2008
Creator: Friess, Erin
Description: This paper discusses a case study on defending design decisions with usability evidence. This case study takes a close look at what novice designers discursively use as evidence to support design decisions. User-centered design has suggested that all design decisions should be made with the concern for the user at the forefront, and, ideally, this concern should be represented by findings discovered within user-centered research. However, the data from a 12-month longitudinal study suggests that although these novice designers are well versed with user-centered design theory, in practice they routinely do not use user-centered research findings to defend their design decisions. Instead these novice designers use less definitive and more designer-centered forms of evidence. This move away from the user, though perhaps unintentional, may suggest that design pedagogy may need to be re-evaluated to ensure that novice designers continue to adhere to the implications of user-centered research throughout the design process.
Contributing Partner: UNT College of Arts and Sciences
Decision-Making Strategies in Design Meetings

Decision-Making Strategies in Design Meetings

Date: 2007
Creator: Friess, Erin
Description: This paper is about research on decision-making strategies in design meetings. Abstract: This project aims to further our understanding of the practice of user-centered design (UCD) by observing the argumentation strategies used by designers in face-to-face meetings in the critical periods between usability research and prototype iteration. In order to conduct such an investigation, the author recorded ten meetings of graduate student designers charged with redesigning documents for the United States Postal Service. The author then used discourse analysis techniques to determine how the designers used findings from research phases as evidence to support proposed design decisions in meetings concerning prototype alterations. Results show that these designers overwhelmingly do not support their design decisions with specific evidence from usability studies. This neglect of research-based evidence may indicate that these novice UCD designers may resort to designer-centric design behaviors in decision-making periods. The authors' analysis will focus on the rhetorical reasons why designers may avoid research-based evidence.
Contributing Partner: UNT College of Arts and Sciences