User Documentation Project

For this assignment, the class will function as a fictional technical communication consulting firm, Indelible, Inc. Each team (4 students) will work autonomously of each other, reporting directly to your instructor, playing the role of your manager.

Michigan Technological University—in its endeavor to sustain the enrollment of foreign students and to make its campus more welcoming to international students—has contracted Indelible, Inc. to design a series of documents to help ease the cultural transition of its international students. The university is seeking documents that are informative, welcoming, and easy to use for an international student who just arrived on campus. Naturally, these documents must be user-friendly and clear.

The goal of Indelible, Inc. is to provide our client with a series of short instructional booklets to help new international students adapt to their new environment. Each of these documents should contain instructions on a specific, audience-specific topic, such as:

• driving in the U.S.,
• health insurance in the U.S.,
• banking in the U.S.,
• eating and cooking in the U.S., and
• being a student in a U.S. university.

After deliberating with your boss and your co-workers, each team will be given the responsibility to design and produce one booklet. The final version of the booklet will be 3–4 pages long in a 6" × 9" format (your pages can be double-sided). The document must be reproducible in black and white.

Project Breakdown

Each team will produce the following throughout the collaborative process:

1. Project planning memo
2. User analysis
3. Task analysis
4. Lo-fidelity prototypes
5. The final project deliverables:
   1. Final report (an internal report to your boss)
   2. Cover document (to the client)
   3. The final user document

This assignment description was originally developed by Laurence José and is distributed
under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.