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Volume 4 Issue 3 2016 Communication Design Quarterly Published by the Association for ComputingVolume Machinery 1 Issue 1 Special Interest Group for Design of CommunicationJanuary 2012 ISSN: 2166-1642 Re-Considering the Nature of Value in Communication Design ..................................................................4 Special section introduction: Examining the Context of Technical Information Use ...............................9 What is an Information Source? Information Design Based on Information Source Selection Behavior ........................................................................................................... 12 Technical Communication Practices in the Collaborative Mediascape: A Case Study in Media Structure Transformation ......................................................................................................................................................20 User Value and Usability in Technical Communication: A Value-Proposition Design Model ................26 Designing Online Resources for Safety Net Healthcare Providers: Users’ Needs and the Evidence-Based Medicine Paradigm .........................................................................35 Editorial: Re-considering Research: Why We Need to Adopt a Mixed-Methods Approach to Our Work ..........................................................................................................46 Review: The Language of Technical Communication. .................................................................................. 51 Review: The Mobile Story: Narrative Practices with Locative Technologies ............................................56 Communication Design Quarterly Communication Design Quarterly (CDQ) is the peer‐reviewed research publication of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Design of Communication (SIGDOC). CDQ seeks to be a premier source on information and communication design for individuals in industry, management, and academia. CDQ contains a mix of peer‐reviewed articles, columns, experience reports, and research summaries on topics of communication and information design, and it is archived in the ACM Digital Library. We invite you to contribute to CDQ by submitting a manuscript in any of the following areas: Peer‐reviewed articles. Articles that cross discipline boundaries as they focus on the effective and efficient methods of designing and communicating information. Disciplines will include technical communication, information design, information architecture, interaction design, user experience design, and human‐computer interaction. Experience reports. Experience reports present project‐ or workplace‐focused summaries of important technologies, techniques, or product processes. Interesting research results. Short reports on interesting research or usability results that do not include the rigor for a full research article (e.g., pilot studies, graduate student projects, or corporate usability studies where full details cannot be released). We are also interested in proposals for guest editing special issues. As a guest editor, you would be responsible for providing three peer‐reviewed articles on a specific topic. By submitting your article for distribution in this Special Interest Group publication, you hereby grant to ACM the following non‐exclusive, perpetual, worldwide rights: To publish in print on condition of acceptance by the editor To digitize and post your article in the electronic version of this publication To include the article in the ACM Digital Library and in Digital Library related Services To allow readers to make a personal copy of the article for noncommercial, educational, or research purposes As a contributing author, you retain copyright to your article, and ACM will refer requests for republication directly to you. ACM therefore asks all authors to include their contact information in their submissions. Opinions expressed in articles and letters are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily express the opinions of the ACM or SIGDOC. Author(s) should be contacted for reprint authorization. Information about joining SIGDOC is available at http://sigdoc.acm.org/join/. 2 Communication Design Quarterly 4.3 Communication Design Quarterly CDQ Editors Interim Editor Kirk St.Amant [email protected] Production Editor Book Review Editor Michael J. Albers Benjamin Lauren [email protected] [email protected] Editorial Board Eva Brumberger Michael J. Salvo Arizona State University Purdue University Alice Daer Darina M. Slattery Qwerty Digital University of Limerick Charles Kostelnick Rachel Spilka Iowa State University University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Edward A. Malone Jan Spyridakis Missouri University of Science and Technology University of Washington Joe Moxley University of South Florida Communication Design Quarterly 4.3 3 Re-Considering the Nature of Value in Communication Design Kirk St.Amant Editor: Communication Design Quarterly Louisiana Tech University [email protected] The concept of value is one of the most complex aspects of the communication professions. Most organization, for example, would admit effective communication adds value to almost any process. After all, effective communication helps members of an organization perform tasks more effectively (enhancing the value their work contributes to the organization). It also helps clients/customers view products as meeting their needs – thus contributing value to the individual’s daily life. Yet determining how communication contributes value is a trickier prospect. (INTER)CONNECTED SOURCES OF VALUE For individuals in usability‐related professions, demonstrating the value one adds would seem relatively easy; the very focus of the field is to identify problem areas and improve product design. But does making something more usable inherently make it more valuable? If the user never even picks the item up to begin with, the work of the UX professional is moot in terms of value gained by the company. So, is the value usability contributes to an organization inherently subservient – or secondary – to the primary value of marketers: the individuals who get customers to try an item in the first place? Or are the value contributions of UX professionals and marketers ancillary to the engineers who design the products? This value spiral (i.e., who is beholden to whom to gain the opportunity to contribute value) could seemingly go on forever. What it makes clear is value – that factor so many entities focus on – is multifaceted in nature and difficult to assess. Yet as more organizations strive to excel in today’s marketplace, members of 4 Communication Design Quarterly 4.3 the workforce need to know how they contribute value in order to advocate for what they do and how they do it. How then to approach this issue? How can one identify and examine the interconnected parts that allow for value to emerge – and be recognized – in a system? The answers can perhaps be found in the paradigm we use when thinking of value. As the idea of value spirals reveals, the perceived value individuals contribute is connected to the context in which they work and in which their organization operates. Changes in the internal (i.e., organizational) or external (i.e. greater societal) contexts, thus, affect how an individual’s actions are seen in terms of what adds value. The intricate connections across such parts means change is a constant, for a shift in one area of this overall system – be it a society or an organization – creates a change in how value is determined and actions are assess in other parts of that system. ECOLOGIES OF VALUE In many ways, the contexts in which definitions and expectations of value exist are like an ecological system. In these systems, small changes to the activities of one part of an environment have a ripple effect that eventually causes shifts in how the overall environment operates. To this end, individuals working in communication fields might think of these systems as ecologies of value – a complex web of dynamic elements continually in flux and constantly being changed by while also changing the other entities in the world around them. Understanding such ecologies of value involves identifying the elements co‐existing and co‐affecting each other in such environments. Within this framework, identifying the ecological variables affecting perceptions of value is particularly important. Once known, individuals can study such variables to see how they work – how they affect and are affected by that individual. In so doing, one can better comprehend ideas of value as driven by this affect‐affected by relationship. One can also begin to define what value is (as it relates to what others do or how others use one’s work). The individual can then use this definition to monitor how variables affecting ideas of value might shift over time. Communication Design Quarterly 4.3 5 IDENTIFYING VARIABLES OF VALUE The central premise of this ecological model is relatively easy to grasp. The challenge comes with identifying the actual variables individuals need to track to understand value expectations within an ecosystem. The entries in this issue of Communication Design Quarterly (CDQ) represent an initial step toward mapping these variables in the context of this greater ecology of value. They do so through a range of genres – from a special section on technical information to a literature‐based approach for considering value to an editorial advocating the expansion of how we do research.

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