Context
My senior capstone team created an educational CD for the historic George Eastman House. The CD application, called "Focus," incorporated imagery and activities for teachers to use in the classroom. I worked on the application's design and user interaction and, individually, I created the Focus Help Guide (PDF on the CD).
Process: Organization of Information
I organized the Help Guide with the same goal as the application: to allow for teachers to easily accomplish a task that can be done in multiple ways. From the client's research with teachers and from understanding how people use desktop applications, I structured the Help Guide content to mimic the routes that a teacher might take to complete a given task.
Since many elementary and secondary school teachers do not have computers at their desk and the CD would be shared between teachers within a school, a teacher would likely want to print a copy of the Help Guide. To address this need for a PDF that prints well on a laser and conserves ink, I used a clean, minimalist design, 8.5" x 11" page size, dark inks and high contrast on a white background.
I included the Focus and Eastman House logos and the page number on every page so that it is easy to associate the page with the Focus application (particularly after printing on a shared printer).
Process: Screenshots
Since people remember visuals easier than text and repetition is key to learning, I integrated screenshots from the application to provide visual aids that directly correlate with what the user would see when performing the task in the application. To discuss a particular element in a screenshot, I designed a bold arrow that worked with the color scheme but stood out against the screenshots and the dark backgrounds. The cream-colored arrow has a border for extra contrast and a drop shadow that punches it out from the flat screenshot.
Process: Visual Hierarchy
I created a visual hierarchy using consistent text styles to distinguish the Help Guide topics and subtopics, much like web headers.
As italics are a cue of importance and are often used for names (such as the names of published works), I used italics to represent the names of links, buttons or icons in the Focus application.
Like many printed manuals, I used bold type with the arrow (-->) notation to reference another section of the Help Guide.
I included user recommendations based on how teachers will use the application (like printing any created activity since teachers will share the CD and will not be able to save their activities in the application). I emphasized a recommendation by placing it previous to its correlating task and by noting it with an asterisk (*).
Impact
Rochester-based teachers in elementary and secondary schools are currently using the Focus application to improve their students' writing and American history education. As one of the project goals was to provide teachers with a tool for standardized test preparation, teachers find the Focus application particularly helpful when practicing for New York State exams.