Here is my Instructions Selection Memo.
I did not really enjoy this assignment. I understand that there was a lot of cheating before when students wrote their own instructions, but that assignment just sounds a lot more interesting (not the cheating part, obviously). I had trouble trying to find something to write about with this assignment. There are not a whole lot of interesting instructions to analyze.
I chose I set of phone instructions because they were free and I could not find anything that pertained to my major (like Google SketchUp or Photoshop) that were inexpensive. This was a good choice as far as simplicity goes. It was easy to analyze. It was also easy to pick out part of the instructions that would be good for testing. This was helpful because this allowed me to accurately decide what success was for this set of instructions. The instructions were for my phone. I use this phone everyday and know that it is important to be able to perform tasks on it, without using the instruction booklet. This is what helped me establish criteria for successful instructions. I decided that I would define “success” as a person being able to quickly perform specified tasks on the phone without looking at the instructions. It was also necessary that each task did not take a long time. Therefore, I decided that two minutes would be considered a “quick” time. This is a fairly long time, but it is not that long when you are trying to remember how to do something on your phone without having the instructions to look at.
If I were able to do this paper again, I do not think that I would choose this set of instructions. While they were great for the Instructions Selection Memo, they made writing the Instructions Analysis memo a little difficult and extremely boring. I think if this were assigned again, I would choose instructions that were less likely to be effective and successful. Because these instructions were well written for their specific audience, my test subjects did not have much trouble following them. Everyone was able to perform each task under the two minute cut off. This made it hard to discuss the instructions in the Analysis Memo. If I chose instructions that had more flaws in them, I would have had more to discuss in my Analysis Memo. It may also have been more interesting if there was something wrong with the instructions. This way, I could analyze and talk about these issues in my final memo.
