Document Development Exposition: Instructions and Usability

ENGL 2116 | Spring 2018

Explain in detail your document’s development from planning to finish, describing your
challenges, how you overcame them, and what you learned.

Planning
I had the most trouble brainstorming for this assignment than any other assignment, because I just
could not think of what instructions I could give regarding apes. I eventually came up with the idea of
telling people how they can adopt an ape. I tried to think how I could make a set of instructions for
adopting an ape, since there are many different types of apes, so I tried to work around that and
make instructions that ask the reader to do research and find the ape they want to adopt and the
organization they want to adopt from. I learned that there are many different ape adoption
organizations, so I wanted to include a quality check of these organizations by looking up information
about them.

First Draft
I had trouble getting many steps for my first draft, because a lot of my original plan revolved around
the user doing most of the research. I also noticed that it would be very confusing for the reader to
know what to do in the instructions, since it requires the reader to do most of the work. To solve
this, I made the steps more specific and tried limit the amount of confusion people would get from
reading them. I also had trouble with the formatting of the instructions, because I have not made
instructions before, so the final design of the first draft did not look very good. I did a lot wrong with
this first draft, but it helped me get an idea of what I wanted to do in my final draft, even if I changed
a lot of what I originally had.

Second Draft
After getting feedback from my peers, I learned that I needed to change my instructions almost
entirely. I got a lot of people telling me how the instructions were confusing because the instructions
were not thorough and required to much research on the reader’s part. So, I changed my
instructions to be about just adopting gibbons from a specific organization. This made the
instructions clearer, because I was able to give more specific instructions on how to navigate the
organization’s website. I also got a lot of feedback on how to change the design of the instructions to
make them better. I used that feedback to change some things around and I added pictures to help
guide the user through the website.

Final Draft
After professor feedback, I realized I needed to make a few more design changes and I needed to
follow more rules of the standards of instructions. I was told in the feedback that the first two steps
should not be steps but should be additional information that goes before the instructions. I also
needed to change the wording of the instructions to be clearer by using imperative verbs at the
beginning of each step. For design changes, I learned that it is better to use bolded text to show what
needs to be clicked on the screen instead of quotations, because bolded font attracts attention and
makes it easier for the user to understand.