June 30, 1999
Conference delves into the World Wide Web’s power to communicate
World Wide Web site design has traditionally been viewed as a series of technical problems, according to Judith Ramey, chair of the Department of Technical Communication at the University of Washington. It’s an approach with limitations, Ramey says, and she is among a group of international students and scholars exploring the rhetorical aspect of the Web, or what makes a Web site communicate effectively.
“We try to understand the dynamics of these things from the user’s perspective, the cognitive perspective and the motivational perspective,” Ramey said. “We look at how to structure information, design text and arrange visual elements so that the needs of the audience are met. All these choices combine to create a persona, a personality that your Web site has. The persona of your Web site invites a visitor into a relationship. That relationship needs to be appealing to visitors before they’ll participate by staying on your Web site.”
Ramey’s department is hosting an international group of technical communication scholars at the University of Washington in July to explore how people interact with the Web and to design guidelines for evaluating the communication effectiveness of Web sites.
The UW Department of Technical Communication’s 1999 International Summer Workshop, “Exploring a Communication Model for Web Design,” is scheduled for July 10-17 in Loew Hall. The teaching faculty will include members of the Department of Applied Communication Science at the University of Twente in Enschede, The Netherlands, which supports a program similar to technical communication at the UW, officials here say. Scholars and students from Germany, Japan, Sweden and Ireland will be participating as well.
An international core team of faculty will present heuristics, or guidelines, to conference participants who will use, evaluate and further develop the guidelines during the conference. After the weeklong meeting, international teams will fine-tune the guidelines for publication.
“The heuristics will allow Web site designers to systematically consider, from the earliest stages of the design process, each dimension of a Web design that might affect its communication suitability and effectiveness,” Ramey said. When finished, the guidelines are scheduled to be published in the journal Technical Communication. Presentations include:
? “A Process for Deriving Heuristics from Research,” Mary Evans, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
? “Current Web Design and Evaluation Practices,” Thea van der Geest, University of Twente.
? “Software Tools for Reader-focused Web Site Evaluation,” Menno de Jong, University of Twente.
? “A Heuristic for Assessing Writer and Reader Roles in Web Site Design,” Mary Coney, UW, and Michael Steehounder, University of Twente.
? “A Heuristic for Assessing the Rhetorical Uses of Server Log Data and Interactivity,” Judy Ramey, UW.
? “A Page-level Heuristic of Web Use,” David Farkas and Jean B. Farkas, UW.
? “A Heuristic for Assessing Web Text Comprehensibility,” Jan Spyridakis, UW.
? “A Heuristic for Assessing the Visual and Perceptual Dimensions of Web Page Design,” Tom Williams, UW.
? “Using General Design Issues and Meta Data to Get Your Web Page Picked Up by Search Engines,” Werner Schweibenz, University of Saarland, Germany.
The conference is part of a concerted effort to build international connections with other technical communication programs, Ramey said.
“This is a relatively new field, at least in terms of academics, and we plan to grow with it.” Sponsors include Microsoft Corp., IBM-Santa Teresa and WinWriters Inc. The Society for Technical Communication also provided a $10,000 research grant for the heuristic development.
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For more information, contact Ramey at (206) 543-2588 or jramey@u.washington.edu. Information is also available on the Department of Technical Communication Web site at http://www.uwtc.washington.edu/workshop/1999/default.htm
