This week Hilmi and I completed and submitted the Illustrated Instructions for setting up a home network. We really hope people find them very useful. We edited the instructions per Kevin's suggestions, and the reviews made by others in the class. I think the biggest improvement was that we fixed the formatting, which made it hard to read. We established a single font and spacing, and used it throughout. I am really satisfied with the result. We had a few meetings in MSN Messenger to discuss project specifics.

This week we will be making the final revisions and corrections to our instructions. We will take into consideration the feedback we received from others using our usability test. Final checks include checking for any minor grammar and spelling mistakes and making sure the illustrations look uniform and correspond properly with the section they are a part of. Finally we will PDF the final version and it will be ready for submission.

I have reviewed the changes Seth made to our instructions and am in the process of making additions. My contributions will primarily be graphics updates and additions, though I continually edit text where improvements can be made. I will get these to him tomorrow, as well as the draft of our revision memo when we have confirmed all of our changes. Since we have not received feedback from our usability test, it may be difficult for us to identify specific areas of improvement, but we will do our best. After finalizing the instructions and revision memo, we each need to finish the project-end documents, specifically the checklist and the peer evaluation.

Well...Reid and I are almost finished with the Illustrated Instructions project. We still need to review and incorporate any changes made by our reviewers. We'll be working on incorporating those final changes by Wednesday night. We'll be working on this final revision together, probably by phone or IM. We also need to go through our final draft one last time with a grammatical fine tooth comb. We'll be trying to catch our last minute spelling and grammar mistakes. Finally, we'd also like to tweak with some of the formatting a bit. There's a few inconsistencies that we'd like to work out of our project. Overall, we're on track to finish by Wednesday evening.

Finishing up the final draft this week will include a few formatting revisions and revisions involving feedback from the usability test.  We need to go through the draft with a 'fine comb' to check for formatting and grammatical errors.  I need to go though the section of instructions involving groups administration and edit it according to the feedback received.  It needs tobe a bit more deatiled/explanatory in order to answer any questions it might currently leave the reader.  I feel that the illustrations are finished, but we could probably look through them all once again to  make sure we are happy with all of them. 

On my own part, I would like to add a small part about possible drawbacks of a static IP address, as one user suggested and also since the reading last week spoke of disclaimers. I think Hilmi will condense his work and crop the pictures and rearrange them so that they do not take as much space on some pages. Also, I will put a small introduction at the top of each section to explain what the section is for, and also an introduction on home networking itself, and why it is a good idea. I will also include a list of system requirements and equipment that may be needed for a home network, but I will try to stay far from hardware since this is not a hardware instruction set.

Other than that, we will look at some specific concerns brought up from the usability test, and go from there. I feel pretty comfortable with where we are, especially since there were so few problems with my hardest part, the static IP configuration. 

The work plan for completing this project should be fairly
short.  We will be using the user
response from the reviews we got on the instructions and usability test to
finalize both drafts.  I think both
drafts are very good, however the instructions may be able to use more work
than that of the usability test.  We will
continue to communicate to finish this project and squeeze it into our work
schedules.  I think this project is in
the home stretch for use with just a few minor tweaks lefts to perform.

We need to update our draft with the comments and suggestions left by another group. I need to find the definition of DCE and UI, which we used in our illustrated instructions. I asked some of the full time Engineers that work here and they didn’t know what it actually stood for. Tyler or I will need to make a brief cover note introducing the project either tomorrow or Wednesday. We also need to do some work to lengthen the instructions. I have some ideas on areas to add to that will possibly help the user. I believe this project can be a success after a little more work.

In order to finish this illustrated project, my team mate and I will have a meeting to go through all the details that need to be completed for the project. The first step that we will do is to read all the comments that have been made on our work. We will start fixing our work based on this comments and later on make some changes to meet the project requirements. We haven't start doing our project revisions memo yet, so this will definitely be the discussion topic during our meeting.

Lastly, we will do some grammatical checking to make sure that everything is in the right order.

Near as I can tell we are done with our project.  Because it is not due until Wednesday we will probably read through it one last time for spelling and grammer.