"From Design to Use: The Roles of Communication Specialists on Product Design Teams," by Steve Doheny-Farina

Steve Doheny-Farina’s “From Design to Use: The Roles of Communication Specialists on Product Design Teams,” deals with the roles technical writers and communication specialists occupy on most product design teams. Doheny-Farina begins the article with several examples of sleek and shiny technology with all the capabilities and functionality in the world, but that are virtually unusable and, thus, not worth the steep learning curve investment for its users. Doheny-Farina traces this problem to the unsuccessful integration of users being involved at every step of the design process, and says it’s very easy for developers, product engineers, and programmers to get stuck in their own heads, and design technical and information systems which appeal only to likeminded people, rather than laypeople and  those likeliest to actually be using the products. In doing so, Doheny-Farina introduces excerpts from Don Norman’s seminal work The Design of Everyday Things, which says that the burden shouldn’t be placed on users in learning how to navigate and use complex, multi-faceted software, but instead on the developers and designers that create the product. This fundamental gap in knowledge and understanding lies in  the developers and designers simply not knowing the users well enough, a problem which Doheny-Farina advises would be mitigated greatly by better and more active integration of technical writers and communication specialists directly into the product development cycle. Where traditionally technical writers have been treated with little regard, with their work seen as less vital and more supplemental to product design than the engineers and developers who actually design and manufacture the product, more active integration of writers, from start to finish, would ensure better communication across the board and ensure the user’s needs are always understood and actively spoken for.
Doheny-Farina then introduces two case studies to better illustrate his point, both featuring technical writers with more access and integration with the product teams than the norm, both for a variety of reasons. The first case study mentioned, ABC Company, featured a company with impending deadlines for a product that was excessively “buggy” and ill-functioning, and thus, writers were integrated into the development team in order to foster better and more effective collaboration, in a sort of “all hands on deck” approach. The two writers, Corrie and Walter, saw their responsibilities within the team grow to include: writing and contributing to the design specs for the product, synthesizing and bringing in outside information for developers and engineers, and coordinating with end-users on overall usability and ease-of-use of the product. This case was unusual in that it put a very high burden on both technical writers, they did however manage to learn a lot from the experience, and provide more value than technical writers typically would under normal circumstances. The other case study Doheny-Farina mentions, dealing with XYZ Corporation, featured a corporation that attempted to instill a more gradual, grass-roots integration of technical writers and information specialists into product development. In effect, co-locating writers and communication specialists among designers and developers caused two clear distinctions and specializations to emerge for writers to occupy. Doheny-Farina calls one distinction the usability writer, or usability advocates whose main focus is along the interface of the product, and the kinds of front-ends interactions that end-users are likely to encounter. The second distinction, known as the design writer, served as technical specialists in a given software or technical aspect, and were tasked with, among other things, acting as facilitator to the rest of the development team, and keeping everyone informed and updated of each other’s progress. Design writers were also able to provide a more general overview of the product, in order to better assist developers and engineers who may be more focused on their own, more narrow specialties. Perceiving the ever-changing field of technical and professional communication that students are sure to encounter in the workforce, Doheny-Farina then advocates for more active integration and co-location of writers among the design team in the workforce, and more multi-disciplinary curriculums in graduate technical writing programs, drawing from fields like rhetoric, visual design, communication and usability research, product design, and science and technology.