[ATTW-L] Congratulations Lee-Ann Kastman Breuch

[Tharon Howard]

Dear ATTW Colleagues,
Please join me in congratulating ATTTW member Lee-Ann Breuch on the publication of her new book, Involving the Audience: A Rhetorical Perspective on Using Social Media to Improve Websites which was recently released.  Lee-Ann’s book is part of the ATTW Series in Technical and Professional Communication published by Routledge.  It’s available from Routledge at https://www.routledge.com/Involving-the-Audience-A-Rhetoric-Perspective-on-Using-Social-Media-to/Breuch/p/book/9780815384540 as well as Amazon.

Lee-Ann’s book as its title suggests is about “involving the audience” through the use of “user-generated content” harvested from social media to help improve the usability and user-experience of websites. Lee-Ann provides case studies of a healthcare website in Minnesota called MNsure.org and a county library system with 41 library branches called HCLib.org.  Through her case studies of these two organizations, she demonstrates how the sites’ managers, information architects, and staff members were able to mine information from social media (particularly from Facebook and Twitter) to improve the user experiences of their websites.  Taking care not to ignore the value of other traditional usability and user experience research methods, Lee-Ann has done our field a service by introducing what she calls “social web usability” to the quiver of user-centered design arrows already available to industry practitioners and TPC students.  Empirical researchers will also appreciate the very careful and well-articulated way that Lee-Ann reflects on how she modified Johnny Saldaña’s approach to grounded theory in order to code the social media data she collected. Her “Methodological Appendix” at the end of the book will doubtless end up as required reading in TPC seminars on research methods around the county.

Kudos and Congratulations, Lee-Ann!

Tharon Howard,
Editor, ATTW Book Series in
Technical and Professional Communication
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