Engineering made EESy has completed the Illustrated Instructions project.  Attached to this blog post is the final draft of the instruction set, Engineering made EESy Presents: An Introduction to Engineering Equation Solver (EES), and a Revisions Memo that details all the changes made to the instruction set since the last posted version. 

For reference, please refer to the links below to view the Project Proposal and the Usability Test.

Project Proposal 

Usability Test 

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.

To finish our Illustrated Instructions project, Erin and I will have to make some minor adjustments to our instructions. These adjustments will be based on comments from a peer reviewer that completed our usability test. After reviewing those comments, it appears that there are not many problems with our instructions as they are, but a couple changes should probably be made. Erin and I will both also review our final draft by going through the instructions one more time as if we were not that familiar with EES. After we have completed the changes and reviewed our instructions, we will be ready to submit our project. This should not be difficult to do by Wednesday.

This week, Erin and I posted our draft of our instructions and our usability draft.  The biggest concern we have is that our instructions may be too technical to follow since we wrote them about a technical program.  I do not think that a prior knowledge is absolutely necessary to follow the instructions, but we did use technical terms in an attempt to show what the program can do.  We think it will be hard for people who do not know what those words mean to look past that, and it may be tough for those people to complete our instructions.  Due to this fact, we are hoping for some very good feedback related to this concern so we can get a better idea of how to approach the instructions.

This week, Reid and I completed our draft of our illustrated instructions. We also posted our usability test. We're hoping to get good feedback on our post this week. We're a bit concerned about the ability of nonengineers to follow our instructions. The program we chose for the topic of the project is very technical in nature. Since EES is sued in thermodynamics and heat transfer study, that background may be needed to actually follow our instructions.

Next week, we're looking forward to creating our final draft of our Illustrated Instructions. We think that we have a good grasp on this project thus far.

Our complete draft of our instructions on "How to Use Engineering Equation Solver (EES)" is attached as a PDF file. We would appreciate any feedback you could provide. The text for our usability test is provided below. Additionally, we have attached a PDF version of our usability test. The PDF version has some formatting that may make the usability test easier to complete.

Thanks for all your help!

Usability Test for Engineering Equation Solver (EES) Introduction

This week, Engineering made EESy accomplished a couple of major tasks.  We both completed our individual drafts of our parts for the Illustrated Instructions Project.  We split up the instructions into parts so that we could maximize our efficiency.  In addition, we created the first draft of our usability test.   Following the creation of our individual drafts of the instructions, we made the decision to eliminate some of the sections of EES we originally wanted to include.  The size of our instructions (trying to keep them to about 25 steps) drove this decision making process.

I am very satisfied with the way the project is going so far.  Erin and I have worked well together, despite communicating mainly online.  We have managed to work relatively efficiently while working through email and mainly while at work.  This week, Erin and I made a lot of progress as we drafted our instructions and created our usability test.  Each of us knows EES fairly well so writing the instructions was pretty easy.  The usability test was more difficult, however.  One concern we had was that we may have used terminology that is of a more technical nature than we realize since we use the terms on a regular basis.  Overall, we are happy with where the project is right now and feel comfortable going into a spring break where neither of us will be able to work on this project.

This blog post contains three things.  First, we're reposting our drafts of our individual instructions.  Each draft contains different parts, so please look at both individual drafts.  The part created by Potrzebowski also contains instructions on how to download EES.  Also, we're posting our draft of our Usability Test.  The usability test is designed to illicit feedback on our instructions.

Comments on the Usability Test

We are most worried about our ability to convey a very technical program to a nontechnical audience.  The author's familiarity with EES and with programming in general could result in vocabulary used that our readers don't understand.  We think that our explanations of thermodynamic property tables could particularly cause confusion.  We would like feedback our on general ability of converying information and steps.

I have attached a draft of my part of our group's individual instructions. The first part of the instructions are in Erin Potrzebowski's draft, which I refer to specifically at one point.  I appreciate any feedback you might be able to give on this part of our instructions.