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Teaching Content Strategy in Technical Communication
Published in Tracy Bridgeford, Teaching Content Management in Technical and Professional Communication, 2020
As the Landscape Analysis assignment for this course is given only a few weeks into the semester, students are often nervous about the Landscape Analysis project and its goals. Walking the class through several examples of digital spaces—websites, screenshots of tablet interfaces and phones, etc.—and discussing different kinds of heuristics is critical to setting up this project. These heuristics can start with a discussion based on the US Government’s usability website (usability.gov, 2018) and their reference to the set built initially by Jakob Nielsen (1994). We ask students to consider the tone and style used across the genre, encouraging them to think in terms of describing issues using terminology from Robin Williams’ (2015) CRAP principles (Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, Proximity). We then typically have students come up with their own set of heuristics that might be more specific and in tune to current issues. For example, much of our discussions in 2017 and 2018 focused on dark patterns (Greenberg et al., 2014; Brignull, 2018; Trice & Potts, 2018) and why we would not want to create them. As Trice & Potts (2018) explain, dark patterns area user experience crafted to trick the user into performing actions not in the user’s own interest (Brignull). Experts have looked at dark patterns in relationship to user interface (Brignull), physical proximity (Greenberg et al., p. 2), and social capital (Lewis 119).(para. 13) We then use this collection of heuristics to walk through some examples to help students become more comfortable with doing the larger assignment, asking them to think of guiding questions such as “What works? What needs improvement?” and slowly getting them to start thinking about questions (such as “How or why does it work?”) that will help them with their next projects.
The Dark Side of Augmented Reality: Exploring Manipulative Designs in AR
Published in International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, 2023
Xian Wang, Lik-Hang Lee, Carlos Bermejo Fernandez, Pan Hui
AR technologies have the ability to integrate virtual objects with the physical world in order to change the users’ perceptions of reality (Chatzopoulos et al., 2017). While these applications are becoming more widespread in the commercial market, there are still limited design guidelines for the AR space. AR application design faces several changes: (i) the rapidly evolving best practices; (ii) challenges with scoping guidelines; (iii) learning by doing (Azuma, 1997; Drascic & Milgram, 1996; Milgram & Kishino, 1994; Speicher et al., 2018). The still newly developed AR technologies (e.g., mid-air interaction, tracking capabilities) can hinder the creation of universal design guidelines. According to Michael Nebeling (University of Michigan, 2021), we can highlight four different sources that attempt to come up with such design guidelines: (i) vendors, platform-driven; (ii) designers, user-oriented; (iii) practitioners, experience-based; (iv) researchers, empirically derived. The HCI community has been studying the effects of UX in society (Ardito et al., 2014; Mannonen et al., 2014; Rajeshkumar et al., 2013) and from the perspective of designers and practitioners (Lárusdóttir et al., 2012; Tromp et al., 2011) in order to provide more responsible guidelines and mechanisms for designing UX. Moreover, the current HCI studies (Di Geronimo et al., 2020; Machuletz & Böhme, 2020; Mathur et al., 2019; Mhaidli & Schaub, 2021; Utz et al., 2019) focus on the influence of such design interfaces on user experiences (UX) and how particular design “tricks” (dark patterns (Brignull, 2019)) can influence the users’ decisions towards behaviors desired by the designers. Following the work (Gray et al., 2018), we define dark patterns as “user interface designs that benefit the system instead of the user.”