"Rhetorical Web Design: Thinking Critically about Ready-Made Web Templates and the Problem of Ease"

Jason Tham

Jason Tham is a PhD student in the Rhetoric and Scientific and Technical Communication program at the University of Minnesota in Twin Cities. His current research includes connected knowledge making and sharing, digital and visual rhetorics, and new inventions in writing and communication technology. His scholarly works have appeared in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Intercom, and Digital America: Journal of Digital Culture and American Life.

Contents

Abstract

Introduction

Of Ease & Efficiency: The Problem with Template-Driven Web Designs

Agency, Techne, and Extreme Usability

Agency, Techne, and Extreme Usability

Analysis of a Template: WordPress.com

Analysis of a Template: WordPress.com Cont.

Recommendations & Conclusion

Works Cited

Appendices

Agency, Techne, and Extreme Usability

The field of rhetoric and technical communication has grown tremendously over the last decade and is becoming increasingly interested in how technical design such as an interface facilitates our interactions with information and other subjects (Hsu & Shiau, 2013), situating users within the power relations of technology use (Selfe & Selfe, 1994), and the negotiation of personal identities (Arola, 2010). The discipline shares an understanding that an interface is a visual argument (Kostelnick, 1996; Sullivan, 2001), served by functional affordances and appeals to a user’s values and sense of logic (Robins, Holmes & Stansbury, 2010; Peak et al., 2014). Situating interface design and technical communication in the rhetorical tradition allows us to benefit from drawing on all ancient practices of argument construction and invention (Mejia & Chu, 2014; Lin, 2007). In terms of web design frameworks that draw on prefabricated templates, I argue for a reenactment of the concepts of agency and techne to push toward a rhetorically-based inquiry that encourage developers and designers, novice and expert, to think critically about the frameworks they employ, and thus making context-specific design without overusing common appeals within existing interface.

The interface of any software, web, or operating system is a designed space. Interface designers purposefully choose graphical elements, fonts, colors, shapes, and sounds (Kostelnick, 1996; Arola, 2010). Since the mid-1990s, rhetoric scholars have brought the rhetoric of interface design to the attention of English/rhetoric and writing and Human-Computer Interaction Studies (Bernhardt, 2013). Cynthia Selfe and Richard Selfe (1994) in their canonical article examined the Macintosh operating system and its interface, decidedly encouraging users to see the interface as maps of capitalism, logocentrism, and discursive (linguistic) privilege. They argue that the interface is a map that is “orientated simultaneously along the axes of class, race, and cultural privilege [and] aligned with the values of rationality, hierarchy, and logocentrism characteristic of Western patriarchal cultures” (Selfe & Selfe, 1994). Paul LeBlanc (1990) argues that “software programs are not neutral” and Paul Taylor (1992) agrees that computer programs “manage the user’s actions by establishing possible and recommended actions.”