Technical & Business Writing (ENG-715) Muhammad Bilal Bashir UIIT, Rawalpindi

Outline Guidelines for Designing Tutorials Summary Identify User Actions You Need to Support State Objectives of Real-World Performance Summary

Writing to Teach - Tutorials Lecture: 5

Guidelines for Designing Tutorials Seven guidelines to design tutorial document includes Identify the skills you need to teach State objectives as real-word performance Choose the right type of tutorial Presents skills in a logical, cumulative structure Offer highly specific instructions Give practice and feedback at each skill level Test your tutorial

Identify User Actions You Need to Support Rely on thorough user analysis to help you identify what skills you need to teach Identify user actions and plan your tutorial around these actions For each action you will teach, list the program skills the user needs This list can serves as a basis of your lesson plans Identify the commands the user should associate with the skill and put workplace task and program skill together

Identify User Actions You Need to Support (Continue…) Tie Program Features to User Actions Selecting task for a tutorial requires that you look over your feature list and decided which one to treat in a tutorial Guidelines that are required for selecting the program features are Central to job performance Some program features will relate more directly to the user’s work. e.g. Reporting or printing Essential for efficient software use Some features like file management, security or basic screen handling must be taught

Identify User Actions You Need to Support (Continue…) Tie Program Features to User Actions (Continue..) Frequency of performance Some features occur so frequently that we will want to teach them to users such as opening file, entering data, printing and quitting the program etc.

Guess It!!! Guess the name, place of thing with the help of following hints Alexander the Great 320 BC Jhelum District 2nd Largest in the world 385,000 tons per year

Identify User Actions You Need to Support (Continue…) Let the Help System Detect Skill Needs Some help programs allow the software to present the tutorials called embedded tutorials Embedded tutorials present a task according to some pre-determined event that triggers the tutorial program They should clearly show choices for the user and keep the task simple and relevant This tutorial offers a way to deliver highly specific information at the point of user‘s need

State Objectives of Real-World Performance Write out the objectives that you want your tutorial to achieve Stating objectives help us to plan your lesson and provide you with the outline of your tutorial project Objectives should appear as actions the user needs to accomplish and the skills the user should learn in order to accomplish them. e.g. “in this chapter you will learn the following skills” “this lesson teaches you to create the drawing in three colors”

Summary Any Questions?