Kirk St. Amant will be providing a live webinar on Cognition, Design, and Usability: Understanding the Minds of Users. We will also be sharing this presentation online through Google Meet for remote attendees. If you have any questions, email Bethany Aguad.

Why are some items easier to use than others? Why can we use certain technologies reflexively, but stumble with others? And how can we look at a new product and inherently seem to know how it works? These situations are all a matter of cognition – how the brain identifies, processes, and responds to information. By understanding certain cognitive workings, technical communicators can create materials to meet an audience’s expectations of usable designs.

In this session, the presenter explains key cognitive factors affecting usability and usable design. In examining these ideas, the presenter will discuss how technical communicators can use such cognitive factors to guide product design and development practices. The presenter will also provide strategies for applying these cognitive factors to create more usable materials for different audiences. The objective is to provide attendees with a cognitive-based method they can use when researching audience expectations to design usable products.

Kirk St.Amant is a Professor and the Eunice C. Williamson Endowed Chair in Technical Communication at Louisiana Tech University (USA) and an Adjunct Professor of International Health and Medical Communication with the University of Limerick (Ireland). Kirk is also the Director of the Health and Medical Communication Center and the Director of the Usability Research Center at Louisiana Tech University and is on the steering committee for Louisiana Tech’s Visual Integration of Science Through Art (VISTA) program. His main research interests are in international communication with a focus on globalization and the design of online education and on designing health and medical communication for international audiences.

All attendees will also receive a copy of the slides after the presentations.

We will be charging the following rates for this meetup:

-$6 for STC Orlando Central Florida Chapter Members (part of Society for Technical Communication membership, not membership of this meetup group)
-$12 for all other attendees

We will be accepting payment at the meeting for face-to-face attendees. The same pricing applies for online attendees. If you want to attend online, please email president@stc-orlando.org to discuss payment methods.