English 421: Technical Writing

Well, we're almost at the end of the semester, and we're just wrapping up all of the projects.  On Tuesday, class was cancelled, so that pushed around some of the final due dates.  On Thursday, all of those dates were finalized, and we received feedback on our documentation.  Our group then decided how we were going to approach the multimedia presentation, and settled on a powerpoint presentation.  None of us have the skills or experience with any other media options, and there is too little time to learn with finals coming up.  Thus, our powerpoint will be on a tim

This week we utilized our time to finish up work on our final draft of the white paper, and we began to write the rough draft of the usability documentation.  For the white paper, we re-wrote our individual sections, and added the missing sections to the piece.  For our usability documentation, we began to write the outline on Tuesday, and then we began to expand on those ideas that were put down.  For the rest of the week we continued to revise and edit the white paper for the most part, and worked a little bit more on the usability.

This week did start off a little slow as someone else has already mentioned, but by Thursday the tempo picked up a bit.  On Tuesday we received answers to our questions on the memo, and from there we had to create two personas for our users, in order to know how to focus our user documentation project.  I typed up one of the personas and Alex typed up the other.  On Thursday, we received the rough draft of our white paper.  We went over it with Cat, and as a group we carefully went over it and discussed what we needed to change.  Each person agreed to take their ori

Since we’re in the middle of our usability project, I tried to find a decent article that isn’t just a re-hash of what everyone else has already found/written about. This article takes an interesting look at usability testing, and its expense (from several vantage points).   The author makes the case that there are many myths about usability testing, and those myths prevent many companies from actually employing the techniques that would be advantageous to their business. 

As we went into last week, class was cancelled on Tuesday, so nothing for that day.  But as we got to Thursday, we began to learn about and set up our usability test, and wrote memos to our repsective group in the other class.  The purpose was to gain a better understanding of how they will use the technology that we are presenting to them, and for us to gain feedback on how to tailor the white paper to suit their needs.  (We also happened to take a quiz on the reading at the beginning of class, which anyone who read it a week prior forgot by that time).  We also te