Senior Project: Image-Based Instructions

Going back to school and focusing on technical communications helped me to understand how much we have all come to rely on technology—and how annoyingly complicated so much of that technology is.  Most of the instructional documentation that I or anyone has ever written has been about bridging the gap between bad design and usability.  Eventually I decided that I was more interested in fixing the bad design than writing instructions to make up for it, and that is when I enrolled in Human Factors’ CUA program. 

Still, good documentation will always have a place in the understanding of technology.  I believe—mostly because of the sheer volume of technology we are all required to use—that good instructions are really important.  In my view, such in instruction should rely heavily on images to get its point across.  I researched and wrote about imaged-based documentation extensively for my senior project (PDF, 2.4k).