user repair guides

Through Eastern Washington University’s connection with the nonprofit electronic repair organization iFixit, I created user repair guides as a service-learning project in my Intro to Technical Communications course. The final Nook BNRV300 repair guides are published on the iFixit website.

At the time of this project, minimal documentation on the Nook BNRV300 device existed, making it difficult for anyone with this device to find specification or repair information. My team was able to produce detailed guides with helpful troubleshooting information for people looking to repair this specific device.

I helped lead my team to research, write, and photograph the necessary steps for repairing and troubleshooting the Barnes & Noble Nook BNRV300 device. I was also the primary communication representative between my team and the iFixit technical writers overseeing our project.

The primary challenge was creating a unified set of guides with three different people writing and photographing the steps. To minimize variations between our guides, we decided that different group members would lead specific functions of the project: I led content creation, while my teammates led research and photography. This helped us divide the workload, maintain consistency, and complete all components of the project.

This project gave me valuable experience creating documentation for hardware, completing task analyses, writing streamlined-step procedures, integrating visuals to support written communication, and incorporating feedback from external stakeholders.

Maintaining frequent communication between team members and the iFixit organization helped us to create well-written, comprehensive repair guides. As of May 2022, these guides have helped more than 150 users, according to iFixit’s monthly analytics update.