The Visual Virtual Space –
Salvo and Rosinski’s article continued a lot of the thoughts I had about last week’s readings and discussion. We as professional communicators are doing more than just using words and putting them on paper and on a website. We are evaluating hierarchies, trying to understand our audience, and utilize rhetoric to best reach the audience to deliver them our desired message. And, according to Salvo and Rosinski, “Effective technical communication has never been simply about writing clearly, but rather, about effectively organizing written communication for future reference and application,” (123).
When I went on a tour at Auburn while considering them as a choice for grad school, I was shown a room completely dedicated to understanding the ways in which people read their computer screens and the choices they make when using websites. It tracked eye movement (where the eyes looked first, how long they lingered on a specific area, etc) and also recorded the choices they made when following links. The students then utilized the information received to write usability reports and to better understand web design and hierarchical choices. As a required course in the curriculum, understanding how users work with a virtual space in order to understand how to design that space was obviously considered to be an important asset to a professional communicator.
If we look at the virtual space like we look at documents that we see everyday, it’s easy to understand how certain layouts, fonts, and spaces work to help define meaning and present to the audience the message we’re trying to portray. Salvo and Rosinski say, “Consider memos, parking tickets, wedding invitations, white papers, and reports for decision making: each of these genres carries part of the message in its visual design and physical presentation. The design indicates a range of possible responses to the text, and defines limits to how readers may choose to receive the text,” (107-108).
Virtual spaces have these same capabilities if we can understand how to utilize them. What we include on a website or leave out says something about our message and what we’re trying to say to our audience. Where we place certain things – under what headings and with what other links also shows how we want our audience to interpret our ideas and guides them through the message we’re trying to portray. And while we might be writing the content for websites and virtual spaces rather than designing them ourselves, it is our jobs as professional communicators to understand the rhetoric of space and classification so that our message may best be understood and to help guide the designers on where to place content as they make the virtual space more graphically/visually stimulating.