On Thursday 7th March, the University of Limerick held its first Technical Communication and E-Learning Research Day, with presentations from Louisiana Tech University professors Kirk St Amant and Nicholas Bustamente, students from Lousiana Tech’s VISTA programme (Visual Integration of Science Through Art) as well as UL faculty and PhD candidates. While each presenter focussed on a specific field and topic, from healthcare and medical to e-government, education and enterprise cloud software, one theme was recurring either implicitly or explicitly: trust.
Note: This post describes my interpretation of this event’s presentations.
Technical communicators are vectors of trust
The Society for Technical Communication (STC) provides a broad definition of technical communication as “the discipline of transforming complex information into usable content for products, processes, and services” and provides ethical principles to guide technical communicators: legality, honesty, confidentiality, quality, fairness, and professionalism. The emphasis on answering user needs and promoting the public good implies that technical communicators should be trustworthy, though gaining and maintaining the trust of the audience does not feature explicitly as an objective of technical communicators.
Healthcare and medical
In health and medical contexts – in particular, in international contexts – any communication efforts will be in vain if you ignore the obstacles resulting from your audience’s context that could hinder adoption, like literacy and the physical and social contexts. To show how ignoring the audience’s expectations can damage the communicators’ credibility and be detrimental to the message, Professor St Amant used the example of Wonder Woman. In Central America, Superman and Wonder Woman comics were used to tell kids about the danger of land mines, but Wonder Woman’s perceived salaciousness meant that she was not as popular with parents. To convince Central American parents to give
Wonder Woman comics to their children, DC Comics had to redesign Wonder Woman with a more modest costume.
Similarly, Margaret Grene’s research showed that both the patients’ health literacy and the language used in health communication can impact patients’ health outcomes. Let’s consider the fact that half of the participants in Grene’s health literacy study gave correct answers to less than half of the questions. If we extrapolate this result, this means that a big part of the population may not be able to rely on health communications to make informed decisions regarding their health because these communications are not fit for purpose.
And it is not only about using plain English either. As was noted by participants in a redesign of inhaler instructions in Grene’s study, oversimplification can also hinder comprehension if the language is not precise enough. Health communication users may have no other choice than to trust the content, but health communicators must walk a fine line giving accurate information that is also accessible and respectful of users’ contexts. Losing health users’ trust can have grave consequences as the current “vaccination hesitancy” trend has shown. The fact that the World Health Organization prioritises the distribution of “trusted, credible information on vaccines” to curb this trend highlights the ethical imperative on technical communicators to place users’ trust at the heart of their mission.
Government, education and the private sector
Three other presentations showed how communication strategies impact trust in users. Pam Wall, who is researching communication heuristics in e-government, argued that, in evaluating the efficiency of online government interfaces, communication is often neglected to focus on user interface engineering and other technical aspects. However, communication breakdowns are just as likely to hamper the trust of e-government service users. Designing a framework to evaluate the efficiency of e-government communication could help to normalise practices that promote trust.
Similarly, Elaine Walsh argues that formalising assessment brief content in higher education can foster a more trusting relationship between students and assessors by removing the uncertainty and the disagreements that can result from briefs that are unclear or missing helpful information. While some assessors and students in Walsh’s research argued that the new briefs could be too long and that students may not read them from start to finish, one student said he might not read the whole brief, but he still likes to know that he has all the information at hand. As a communications user, I relate to that comment.
As more and more online communication becomes topic-based, even “molecular”, and chatbots become the primary contacts for user assistance, I am one of those users who often struggle to “converse” with chatbots and to decipher how automated user helps want me to phrase my questions. I like to know where and how I can find all the answers in order to complete whatever task I am doing at the moment. And unless I have no choice but to use a certain tool, I will abandon it if I need human assistance at every turn.
This is where Rachael Hewetson’s research comes into play. She argues that the move of enterprise software from on-premises solutions to the cloud has put business software companies in a precarious position in terms of customer retention. The cloud technology fosters competition by reducing the cost and complexity of switching providers. On the other hand, the cloud takes some of the power away from customers as updates are now pushed to them. In that context, product adoption is no longer about convincing customers to install an update. It becomes about assisting customers to build their trust in the new functions and in their ability to use these functions. Cloud technology means that businesses have to work harder to maintain customer trust and loyalty.
Hewetson described how a people-centric approach to user assistance may help to build customer trust by addressing the customers directly with a more conversational tone, providing just-in-time assistance together with more traditional user communications like manuals, etc., providing feedback channels and engaging with users on social media. This people-centric approach recognises the technical communicators’ importance in the post-sale customer experience, and even at the pre-sale stage because more and more prospective customers engage with businesses on social media before making a purchase decision. Technical communicators play a role in attracting and retaining customers and they need to adopt new communication styles and strategies that build and maintain trust and loyalty.
Trust in the communicator/ requester relationship
To finish this Thursday’s research day, four students of Louisiana Tech’s VISTA programme presented some of the visual works they have created in collaboration with scientific researchers and other healthcare collaborators. I am not going to discuss their work in detail because it is truly fascinating and would require a separate post, but I encourage everyone to visit the VISTA website to see some samples.
In describing their works, each of the four students explained the challenges – and the responsibility – of researching and representing a topic in a field that you have limited or no specialised knowledge of, like microbiology, mental health, professional translation, etc.
To best serve the consumers of these visual works, the communicator/ requester collaborations required trust. The students repeated several times that they had to rely on the expertise of their requesters, whether they were researchers, health professionals, publishers, etc., but they also had to gain the trust of these requesters by asserting their expertise as visual communicators. To build this trust, each party had to learn to communicate its needs reliably in a language that the other party understands.
These students experienced that clear communication and trust are not only objectives for professional communicators, but also pillars of their work processes. The awareness and the confidence gained from these practical experiences give them an invaluable advantage at the start of their careers as professional visual communicators.
References
Mangles, C. (2017) ‘The rise of social media customer care’, Smart Insights, 5 December, available: https://www.smartinsights.com/customer-relationship-management/customer-service-and-support/rise-social-media-customer-care/[last access 9 March 2019].
Society for Technical Communication (n.d.) Ethical Principles, available: https://www.stc.org/about-stc/ethical-principles/[last access 9 March 2019].
World Health Organization (n.d.) Ten threats to global health in 2019, available: https://www.who.int/emergencies/ten-threats-to-global-health-in-2019 [last access 9 March 2019].
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