English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

With the focus of our group's proposal a little off track, some of the research I've already conducted won't apply to our slightly shifted topic. The focus is now on the general IT needs of educational institutions (both small and large scale), and the white paper's decision focuses on what software solutions are viable and at what costs. Most schools today use closed source, commercial software, and have had great success, but others are finding value in open source and other free software. We want to present the case for both sides, and in several areas of software including operating systems, and word/office processing suites. The paper will be catered to the audience of school board directors; those who are in charge of decisions concerning IT funding. We want to educate this type reader on this topic, so IT costs can be controlled, while still offering powerful IT advantages to students and faculty.

I played the role of organizer for group 4 in this first week of the project. I contacted the other group members via email and shared my name, email, AIM s/n, and google account, and urged everybody to respond back with the same information. I also recommended we utilize google docs for this project, and am adding members of the group to have shared access to the documents. We picked a topic and split up the work: this week I would write the group activity report which was done and submitted by Friday night and we will rotate who writes this every week.

The tasks to accomplish in week 12 included contacting team members and opening lines of communication, choosing a topic, splitting up the work, writing a proposal, and providing support documents detailing the progress of the group and the individuals within it.

The topic this week and for the remainder of the semester is white papers. I've had some experience using white papers in the past, but most seemed either overly technical, in the case of a theoretical physics paper, or overly biased towards one solution, as in the case of a wireless carrier's product. However, after reading the material covering white papers, I can definitely see how an unbiased white paper can be very informative and can help a decision maker make better decisions.

Attached is the final drafts of my instruction sets. I've made some revisions including adding even more information to the helpful table of contents section, and adding labels for all figures that are then referenced from the document.

I've attached both novice and expert set in pdf format as requested for the class, but if anybody needs them in their original format (HTML/CSS/images) I could e-mail a zipped copy. (Just noticed I can't upload zip files on here, or I would just include it)

These instruction sets are for using TrueCrypt to create virtual encrypted drives for storing sensitive information. As discussed in my proposal, the novice user that is targeted with the QuickStart guide would be the manager of a small business that doesn't have an IT-person on staff, but still wants to encrypt sensitive business information. The quick start guide I've created is a step by step guide to using TrueCrypt to set up a virtual encrypted drive with the default settings.

For the online TrueCrypt instruction sets I'm creating I plan on performing a document markup usability test. Because the instruction set for TrueCrypt is a technical procedure with steps, this type of test will provide several key areas of feedback. These include answering the questions to "Can they understand it?" and "Can they do it?". In the document markup usability test a peer reviews the document as they follow the procedures and mark places where they get confused.

Since I have elected to use html/webpage format for my instruction set, instead of using word or another graphic/layout editor, I've created the actual XHTML/CSS instruction template. Since this is a very time consuming process, I've included both elements of the novice and expert instruction set in one pdf with explanation here:

The list format displayed (1, a, i) will be used in the novice instruction set along with screenshots to guide the user through the basic steps of creating the encrypted drive.

As a professional web designer, I've learned that design matters for a lot of reasons. Many of them were stressed in the instructor blog this week including: design as product interface, design is invisible, design is persuasive, design guides the eye, design utilizes white space effectively, and design requires careful attention.