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
The planning portion of this assignment was in some ways more difficult than actually completing the
assignment. At first thought there are just so many possible things I could have written instructions
on. When I decided to go with a CAD design model, I was really worried that it was going to be hard
to explain things step-by-step without it being too confusing. I knew from the start that I was most
likely going to need a decent number of visuals along the way to help explain everything. My initial
style guide was very bland and that was definitely going to be an issue I was going to have to work on
throughout my drafts. Overall, I decided in the planning phase that the extent of CAD design
knowledge I attempted to present was definitely going to have to be figure out along the way as I
was writing the instructions.

First Draft (for peer editing)

The first draft for my instructions took a very long time to construct. I did not have an exact script
laid out from planning since I did not want the amount of knowledge to be overwhelming, so I just
started at the very basics of starting up SolidWorks. As soon as I started, I realized that there were a
lot more buttons and processes going on that was going to make it very hard to understand the
instructions. I had a really good idea to create a figure that depicted and explained the most
important aspects of the user interface, which I thought would help a lot with understanding the
instructions. However, as I continued to write my first draft, I was having to add extra details to every
step to make them as clear as possible. Unfortunately for my draft, I ended up creating a lot of steps
that were not explicit actions which would take a lot of work to try and re-word and condense later.

Second Draft (for your packet)

The major issues I had with my first draft simply dealt with too much unnecessary information in
additional steps. To try and combat this issue, the first thing I did was go through every step and try
to make sure they all started with an action word. This was a really good way to try an condense the
information and make the instructions much easier to follow. I felt like my instructions were a lot
more engaging after making those adjustments. However, I still felt like a lot of the steps just needed
more detail. Instead of making these points individual steps, I created bullet points below their
respective step to try and explain the step. Additionally, through this point I had never gotten around
to changing the relatively bland style guide of my instructions. These two actions turned out to be
the major issues that I would need to change for the portfolio.

Final Draft (for your portfolio)

For the portfolio, the two main changes I needed to make was improving the overall style of the
instructions with boxes, shading, etc. as well as making yet another effort to get rid of unnecessary
overexplaining of steps. For the portfolio draft, I spent a lot of time perfecting the style of the
instructions and I saw a huge improvement in the overall look and design of my instructions.
Moreover, I decided to completely remove any information that did not pertain directly to the model
being designed. Even though this information would have been useful for other CAD design projects,
it was unnecessary details for my instructions. Additionally, I decided to format useful information
that did not contain direct actions as tips, and I formatted useful information pertaining directly to
actions as notes. Overall, I learned a lot about making my documents much more engaging to an
 Document Development Exposition: Instructions and Usability Test Script

audience through design and clarity/conciseness of writing.