help instructions

I completed this experiential-learning project entirely online as a part of my Instructions and Procedures course. This project involved writing and testing instructions for the student account-creation process on the online learning platform Riipen.

Riipen is a nonprofit organization partnering with academic institutions across North America to connect college students with projects and internship opportunities in their specific field of study. For my team’s particular project, we addressed Riipen’s need to improve the documentation of their login processes from the student user perspective.

I took on the leadership role in my group, keeping regular communication with our client Kelly McGillis, delegating responsibilities to team members, coordinating virtual meetings, and establishing group deadlines to complete assignments on time.

My major takeaways from this project included improved skills in procedural discourse and professional collaboration. I specifically gained experience performing the following activities:

• Performing task analyses
• Writing streamlined-step procedures
• Considering user-centered design + GUI
• Performing usability testing to verify the effectiveness of our documentation
• Collaborating + communicating with a client from an external company
• Using style guides

I created the section on Signing Up for a Riipen Account via LinkedIn, incorporated all in-line graphics, and edited the entire document for consistency.

The main challenge with this project was in maintaining that consistency in the copy as well as the appearance. Since we each completed our own section of the instructions, I volunteered to edit and format the final deliverable. Everyone contributed their own images and text, and I simply merged them into one document and created a functional layout.

My team submitted a clean and precise PDF of our instructions on Signing Up for a Riipen Account to our client Kelly McGillis as a final deliverable. I made sure to follow the company style guide, incorporate all prior feedback and requests the team received from Kelly, and unify the tone of each individual section.

At the end of our project, Kelly wrote the following review of my work: “Emily did an excellent job as the team leader for this group. She provided regular updates for the team, and her communication was always clear and direct. Emily did a great job of clarifying questions in order to make sure that the final project was specific and would be of great benefit to future students who use the step-by-step guides when signing up to Riipen.” – Kelly McGillis, Riipen Academic Client Success Associate