Creating Content That Influences People: Considering User Experience and Behavioral Design in Technical Communication

Abstract

As people today use information products in contexts with distractions, we need to design for people’s attention. User experience design routinely relies on behavioral design to engage distracted users and nudge them toward specific behavior. Although practiced in user experience design, behavioral design is less known in technical communication. In this article, we use the CHOICES (Context, Habits, Other people, Incentives, Congruence, Emotions, and Salience) framework developed by McKinsey’s Behavioral Lab to introduce students to learn about behavioral design principles that make use of cognitive biases to influence people. We maintain that behavioral design is useful for technical communicators because they create digital assets that are part of the user experience.

Extending Design Thinking, Content Strategy, and Artificial Intelligence into Technical Communication and User Experience Design Programs: Further Pedagogical Implications

“…as part of doing usability research, allows TPC departments to start thinking in terms of what AI can do for our field. At the same time, we want to emphasize that many design practices are already impacted by AI methods that keep track of users, such as those used in UX behavioral design (Verhulsdonck & Shalamova, 2020). Therefore, we should consider AI not as a standalone course, but as an essential ingredient in how technical communicators do things in the future and how we practice constructing content for and with, and studying, end users.…”

Transforming research methods education through data science literacy

“…Finally, most programs cover research ethics-a fundamental concern of the digital age moving forward. Research ethics can and should be expanded to consider data ethics emphasizing data governance, privacy (Mergel, 2016), ownership (Hand, 2018), and behavioral design (Verhulsdonck and Shalamova, 2020).…”

ARCO Mapping the Cognitive Dynamics of Communication Expectations: An Approach to Designing Usable Content Based on Audience Expectations

“…Other technical communication scholars have noted how members of the field could adopt cognitive approaches from usability to expand more common professional practices including conducting research (McNely et al, 2015;Redish, 2010), crafting technical presentations (Garner et al, 2009), and even editing technical documents (Redish & Selzer, 1985;Soderston, 1985). More recently, technical communication researchers have begun to examine these connections as a mechanism for engaging in issues of social justice (Acharya, 2022;Cheung, 2017), exploring design thinking (Pope-Ruark et al, 2019;Verhulsdonck et al, 2021), and considering behavioral design practices (Verhulsdonck & Shalamova, 2020). This article represents a continuation of this prior work at the intersection of technical communication, usability, and cognition.…”