English 421: Technical Writing

 The last week of class our group presented the rough draft version of our multimedia documentation.  The presentation was a powerpoint that was based off of the personas we created in class several weeks earlier.  Our final draft of the multimedia project is now completed and turned in.  All is well.

Dylan

Our group finaly met this past thursday after what seemed like weeks away from class.  We decided to go with a powerpoint presentaion for our mulimedia documentation project.  We are going to base this presention off of the personas that we created for the usaility project.  The rough draft of this is going to be due tomorrow but we completed it in class on thursday.  Cat also informed is of our documentation project that will be due in the coming weeks and what exactly is required for it.

Dylan

 The last week that our group met we put some finishing touches on the usability project, as well as turned in the final draft of our white paper.  We each revised our individual sections of the white paper and then posted them.  The main revisions that were needed were better visuals and more consistency in the writing.  The questions and answers thing with the other class didn't really work out so we had to use our own created personas for the usability project.  

Dylan

www.ucc.ie/hfrg/emmus/guidelines/d11what.html

This is a very old article about usability in multimedia.  The main focus on the article is on determining usability, so the fact that it was published in 1999 really does not detract from the article very much.  I liked it because the author is very straight forward with the format.  Since I mostly just scan through articles and do not read them word for word, I like the fact that every one of the main points was in large bold print.

 Article

I found this article from a British website about the relationship between online security and usability.  The author talks mostly about how online security is generally weak because people do not properly utilize passwords.  For instance, a good portion of the population currently uses a single password for all of their online accounts.  This is obviously not very secure, but the author says the reason this happens is due to a lack of usability in websites.  

This week in class our group got the rough draft back for out white paper.  We went over it together and decided on several things that need to be corrected.  We came to the conclusion that we should each work on our individual sections on our own time and post them to the website.  We were also going to start making our usability document, however our questions did not get returned.  Hopefully we can work on it Tuesday.

Dylan

 This past week, our group was assigned a company to work with for out collaboration project.  I believe it was flex adventures, which was the one with the party bus.  So basically we have just been thinking of specific questions to ask them.  The whole idea of the project is to make our web 2.0 sites more usable for a specific company.  So we tried to ask questions that would give us a better understanding of who we will be working with.

Dylan

 article

This technical article is essentially about how to organize massive amounts of information on the web, as well as testing that information to see if it all makes sense.  It seems to be primarily focused on small businesses and really does a good job of selling their product.  The article is extremely well put together.  It has good visual aids.  It is very descriptive and well written.  It is also very well organized with having very distinct categories.

 We now have the rough draft of our white paper put together.  Earlier this week, everyone in our group submitted their own sections of the rough draft.  I had the scheduling tools portion of the paper.  We had four people actually write segments, and the 5th put the entire paper together and essentially blended everything.  Right now we are working on a memo for the collaboration project.  If I understand it correctly, we are just supposed to explain the products that our white paper was about briefly.  

Dylan

Career Guide for Technical Writers