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
When writing instructions, I wanted to write about something I know how to do and can explain. As I
love music and love playing the guitar, I thought that it was a good idea to start there. The biggest
problem I was facing, was how do you teach someone guitar over a word document? This was
difficult, as there are a lot of things that go into guitar. So I decided to focus on a few basic things,
that ultimately could lead to someone having an enjoyable experience trying to play for their first
time.

First Draft (for peer editing)

This was a quite basic design for the first one as it was hard to figure out what I was doing. Visuals I
felt were really important because if there weren’t any, its hard to know what is what on a guitar.
Some assumptions I made were that someone had a guitar, they knew what tuners did, and they
knew how to hold it.
Then I had 3 steps:
Tune the guitar
Learn how to read a tab
Play
Breaking these down was a little difficult, but tuning and reading tab were fairly easy to write about
Playing was more abstract, but was still relevant to the instructions

Second Draft (for your packet)

Unfortunately, I did not receive any peer editing, so the decisions I made were on my own. I decided
to redesign most of it as I didn’t like how it looked, and I added more distinct visuals as it felt bland
on its own.

Final Draft (for your portfolio)

The feedback I received this time was very helpful and straight forward. I changed the wording for
almost everything to be action based and moved anything else to a notes section as it was still
relevant. I think this version is definitively better than the last, and overall is much easier to follow.
My biggest mistake on the other drafts was trying to get everything on one page. I thought it would
be nice to layout a quick guide on one page, but it honestly made it a longer guide to follow.