Instructions Project Evaluation
I will ask myself the following questions as I evaluate the
rhetorical appropriateness
of your instructions and final report.
The Instructions
Audience
- Are your instructions suited to the audience they are addressing, in terms
of their vocabulary, content, and means of address?
- Are your instructions making assumptions about the audience's needs that
are realistic and accurate?
- Do your instructions make appropriate assumptions about what the user
already knows or not? Do your instructions correct any possible misunderstandings
your audience might have about the product?
- Do your instructions develop and present a compelling ethos to
your audience? Do they reflect well on the company? Do your instructions
make a personal connection with the audience?
- Are the instructions appropriate in completeness, accuracy, and scope,
depending on your audience's needs?
- Is your use of language and terminology approachable for you audience?
Usability
- Do your instructions
- contain usable, detailed pictures?
- offer the audience readable text, both in terms of the
enjoyability of the prose and in terms of presenting
text that's decipherable?
- maintain parity between the organization of the task/information and
the visual organization of the of document (logos)?
- include signposts (things like icons that tell the user what to expect
from a certain piece of text)?
- Do your instructions avoid
- presenting too much information for the intended audience?
- using pictures and diagrams that are too detailed or cluttered?
- offer too much salesmanship?
- using layout elements or fonts without contrasting styles?
- Do you include relevant information that will help your user to not just
use the product, but to solve a larger problem?
- Drawing from your task analysis, have you broken the task into meaningful
parts? Is the information you present manageable?
- Do you show evidence of having meaningfully revised your instructions
based on your usability studies?
Layout and Design
- Are your texts and images readable, particularly in black and white?
- Is the organizational scheme of your document immediately
visible in your overall layout and design?
- Do you avoid
unecessary or redundant visual features?
- Can your document be easily and intuitively navigated?
- Do you maintain proximity between related images and text
in your document?
The Report and Client Document
Your Ethos
- Do you come across sounding like the smart, capable people that you are?
- Do you sound professional? Does your client document build
and maintain the ethos of our consulting firm?
- For the report, are you consciously designing a coherent,
single document, or are you just stitching a bunch of stuff
together?
- For the client document, do you use a document genre
that is appropriate to the rhetorical function (letter,
report, memo, etc.)?
Report Structure and Content
- Does your report contain the information that I (as your
fictional boss) am expecting, in a form
that is easy for me to read?
- Does your report contain the information that is necessary as it becomes
part of the textual history of the company? Will you document be a usable
reference for future projects?
- Do you provide sufficent details for future employees to
re-create what
you did? Do you provide these details in such a way that I (again,
as your boss) can
still read the report quickly?