Teaching usability in a technical communication classroom: Developing competencies to user-test and communicate with an international audience

With the increased presence of usability and international/global communication in academia and the corporate world, it is important that college students develop competencies to user-test and communicate with an international audience. To infuse usability and international communication into an advanced technical communication course, I designed an assignment in which students perform usability testing on brochures intended for international graduate students. Through this assignment, students were challenged to develop appropriate testing strategies and methods for visual documents, perform the testing with international users, document the process in a report and present their findings and recommendations in a memorandum. This paper describes how implementing such an assignment sequence into technical communication courses can better prepare students to develop a more in-depth knowledge of communicating and collaborating with an international audience through user-testing, in addition to helping them understand visual rhetoric and experience user-centered communication.