Instructions Project

You have been approached by Oakland University's Technology Services (UTS) unit to compose a "quick start" instructional document for Oakland students. Specifically, you will be responsible for documenting one of the following Google technologies:

  1. Google Docs
  2. Google Presentation and Calendar
  3. Google Sites
  4. Google Forms

The document must be in the form of a PDF file that can be distributed in hard-copy, by email, or via Moodle and it should be between 5 and 10 letter-sized pages in length. You may include screenshots, illustrations, and other design elements as necessary.

In addition to producing the instructions, you will also compose a 500–750 word cover report to UTS describing the features of your instruction set and make the case for why your documents are likely to be successful.

Composing Process

1. User Analysis

Before you begin drafting the instructional document, you need to consider who your audience is so that you can take their needs into account. Although you can't "know" your audience in any essential sense—your audience isn't a monolithic or homogeneous thing, but rather a dynamic and widely varying group of people—you can make strategic decisions about them that will help you to create documents more useful to them. In addition, you can do first-person research on one or more representative members of that audience in order to support reasonable assumptions about your audience as a whole.

2. Task Analysis

After you have done some work to determine who your users are, your next step is to determine the component steps of the procedure you are documenting.

  1. Brainstorm every possible piece of information that you may need to include in the documentation. Go through the procedure yourself, and catalog not only the procedure's steps, but also the information users will need to accomplish their task safely and successfully.
  2. Determine what should be left out and what should be included. When doing this, take into consideration your production limitations and your audience's needs (refer back to your user analysis).
  3. Consolidate the sub-steps into larger procedure chunks, and plan an organizational strategy for the document.

Keep in mind that successful instructions go beyond just presenting the user with a list of steps needed to be able to use the technology—they allow the user to use the technology to get their tasks accomplished and to solve a problem.

3. Design, Prototyping, and Production

Drawing from the information you developed in your user and task analyses, design several different mock-ups, or "lo-fidelity prototypes," of your document. The reason for prototyping is so that you can consider an overall document design strategy without committing too many resources to making polished drafts. The prototype will also provide the plan to guide your group as you put together a final document.

The prototype should be a sketch or mock-up of the overall document design, showing approximations of the final illustrations and text. Although you can do this digitally, you may find it faster and more effective to use such "low technologies" as pencil, paper, scissors, tape, and a photocopier.

After you have produced a prototype and all the members of your group are satisfied with the overall design, you can move on to making a more complete draft of your instructions document.

4. Usability Testing and Revision

User testing—or usability testing—is where you get to try out your instructions with a potential real-life user. In doing this, you can determine whether the assumptions that you made in your user and task analyses were appropriate, and whether there are any significant design or content issues that you can fix. Usability testing reveals unforeseen and often surprising problems with documents as they are used by an audience in context.

After you have agreed on a mock-up and have drafted a set of instructions, you can begin to plan your usability test. In practice, there are many different kinds and ways of administering usability tests. As you've read about, some are done in laboratories using one-way mirrors, cameras, intercoms, and strict empirical protocols. Others are done less formally in the context of the document's actual use. For this assignment, you should perform an informal version of the "think aloud protocol" with a test user. In this type of usability testing, you invite your user to vocalize their thinking as they perform the task using your instructions. Then, as the user goes through the steps, carefully record their actions and reactions.

Keep in mind that a user test is meant to help you determine the ways in which your instructions fail to work rhetorically as you intended. It is not the role of the user to give you design advice or even to tell you how to fix the errors they find.

Here's a general overview of the process:

  1. Orient the user to the purpose of the test. Reassure them that you are only testing the effectiveness of your instructions, not the user or their ability to use the system.
  2. Explain to the user how to perform the think aloud protocol.
  3. Without prompting the user, record what the user did, how they did it, what comments they made, and whether the task was accomplished successfully or not.
  4. After the test, determine in your group what works about your document, what doesn't work, and where you should focus your revision.
  5. After you revise your document, repeat the above test with other users, if possible.

5. Submit the project deliverables


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by Jim Nugent under a
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