Document Development Exposition: Instructions and Usability Test Script

Explain in detail your document’s development from planning to finish, describing your
challenges, how you overcame them, and what you learned.

Planning
I knew I wanted to write instructions for how to change car brakes because I recently did that. I
looked at a couple of examples of instructions and decided how I wanted my instructions to look,
which was a simple and easy format where there is a picture after each step so the user could follow
along. I did not really face any challenges in the planning portion because I just wrote a paragraph
describing what I was going to do. The challenges came when I started the first draft which is
described in the next section.

First Draft (for peer editing)

The first challenge that I faced was where I wanted to put the pictures. I ended up putting them on
the left half of the page and below each set of instructions. I learned that word has a feature where it
lets you select a format that you want so I selected a format and changed it slightly from there. The
next challenge that I faced was deciding how much detail I should put in the instructions. In the end,
I ended up not going into much detail because the pictures helped with the descriptions of the steps.

Second Draft (for your packet)

I learned from the peer edit that my first draft had spacing issues that I need to fix. I did this by
decreasing the size of the document on my screen so I could see more which allowed me to see
where the spacing issues were. By decreasing the size of my document from around 130 percent to
50 percent I was able to see two pages at once so I could compare the two pages and go from there.
Overall, I learned that instructions need to be easy to follow and also look nice to the eye which I
believe my second draft accomplished.

Final Draft (for your portfolio)

I learned that I needed to add more design features so I added shading to the title and to a box later
on in the instructions. I also learned that instead of using a phrase like “Don’t trust your mechanic” it
is better to use a phrase like “Trust your mechanic but want to save money?”. I added some white
space to separate sections and learned that I should avoid mixing sequential lists so I changed that in
my final draft. Overall, I thought my document was pretty well written going into the final draft but I
learned that I could fix even more things in the document to make it look even better.