Technical and Business Writing

Lecture Slides
By
Rana Muhammad Yaseer

Department of Information Technology and Science

 2

Guidelines for Designing Procedures

 3

Outline

1. What is a Procedure
2. Guidelines for Designing Procedures
1. Relate the task to meaningful workplace actions
2. Determine how much information your user needs
3. Choose the appropriate instructional format
4. Follow a rhythm of exposition
5. Test all procedures for testing
3. Summary
 4

What is a Procedure?
• A procedure is a step-by-step series of commands
for accomplishing a meaningful operation with a
software program
 5

Guidelines for Designing Procedures

• There are five guidelines in order to design a
Procedure;
1. Relate the task to meaningful workplace actions
2. Determine how much information your user needs
3. Choose the appropriate instructional format
4. Follow a rhythm of exposition
5. Test all procedures for testing
 6

1. Relate the Task to Meaningful Workplace Activities

• The meaningfulness of a procedure comes from its

application to work
• The goal of writing procedures is to see them as part
of larger activities
• The procedures occur at operations level of
activity/action/operation model
 7

2. Determine How Much Information User Needs

• Procedure contain varying amount of detail, sometime
rich with detail, sometime more scattered depends
on the difficulty of task or reader experience
• A richly detailed procedure needs more visuals and a
greater amount of information
• User analysis should indicate whether user needs a
lot of detail or not so much
• Electronic presentations allow the user to get more
details if he/she needs it at the time. This technique is
called layering
 8

Details that can Enrich the Procedure

(Continue…)
• Screen Shots
• Shows actual user interface, what menus to display and
what choices to make
 9

Details that can Enrich the Procedure

(Continue…)
• Cautions and Warnings
• Cover occasions where the user needs to be careful of
possibly damaging an action / product
 10

Details that can Enrich the Procedure

(Continue…)
• Notes and Tips
• Opportunity to suggest alternatives, workarounds or helpful
applications to user’s activities
 11

Details that can Enrich the Procedure

(Continue…)
• Tables
• Allow users with arranged sets of numerical information
and text information, or to organize text to support decision
making.
 12

Details that can Enrich the Procedure

(Continue…)
• References
• Refers to other sections of the manual or other resources.
 3- Choose the appropriate instructional
format
• Chose an appropriate instructional format for
procedure , from very brief ones to full-scale
manuals.
• Easy to Understand
• occurs both in print and online media
4- Build a Pattern of Explanation
• Build a pattern of exposition whereby you repeat the
following rhythm
1. Give action to take: “Select Open….from the file menu.”
2. Explain the result: “The program will display an empty file.”
• Spend your time explaining the result, and avoid
giving alternative advice as it can distract the user
from task
• For practice you can include a real world exercise
in your lesson that gives software user freedom of
experiment, which most of the users like
5- Test all procedures for testing
• Your Procedure, like other documentation products,
should get a thorough session in the testing lab
• You should base the testing on the objectives of the
Procedure
• Keep testing in mind during planning stages and watch
out for the points you will want to verify through testing
 16

Summary

1. What is a Procedure
2. Guidelines for Designing Procedures
1. Relate the task to meaningful workplace actions
2. Determine how much information your user needs
3. Choose the appropriate instructional format
4. Follow a rhythm of exposition
5. Test all procedures for testing
 Thanks
Best of luck