Instructions Project: Overview
Summary:
The Instructions Project asks each student to create a set of clear, concise instructions that covers a substantial technical task from their field or an area of interest for a non-specialist audience. Students will select topics, formats, and strategies for their instruction sets that are rhetorically effective. All instruction sets must include non-textual elements, such as tables, graphs, illustrations, screenshots, or multimedia content. All material in instruction sets must be original or acceptable for commercial use. As such, the class will be conservative in its use of generative AI due to current legal questions regarding IP. Instruction sets should not include unmodified generative AI textual outputs. Instruction sets should include only images that are original, licensed, or generated by Adobe Firefly Links to an external site. (which has been trained on a dataset of licensed and public domain content).
Professional writers are often tasked with composing instructional documents, and producing helpful, user-centered instructions is quite challenging. A main goal for this project is for students to explore how instruction sets address specific audiences, contexts, and purposes.
Students have successfully covered subjects including creating histograms with Microsoft Excel, editing short videos, and performing CPR. Instruction set formats have ranged from small printed package inserts to online tutorial videos. All final instruction sets should be delivered in their intended final format. If this is not possible, students should notify the instructor.
Students will administer two different usability tests to develop their instruction sets: one that can be administered inside of class and one that can be administered outside of class.
Deliverables:
- Intention Document (5 points)
- Design Plan (5 points)
- Draft and Usability Test 1 (5 points)
- Draft and Usability Test 2 (5 points)
- Final Instruction Set (50 points)
- Materials Analysis (20 points)
- Postmortem (10 points)