Reimagining User Manuals for UX
My Roles: Technical UX Writer, Copy Editor
Background
Splash ‘n Swim School is a private company located in West Richland, Washington that provides group, private, and semi-private swim lessons to children and teens in the community. Although they have returning employees every summer, each year many new employees join the team. Returning employees require a refresher of company policies, and as a small business, Splash ‘n Swim often changes its procedures, class structure, and codes of conduct; thus, an update of the handbook is in order.
This document had not been edited since new material was added. The Splash ‘n Swim School onboards new employees throughout the summer and needed an updated, readable document to use for training purposes.
Project Details
Client: Splash n’ Swim School
Duration: 2 weeks
Methods: Client Collaboration, Copy Editing, Substantive Editing, Presentation
Tools: Google Suite, Sketching
Project Overview
The Problems
The entire document needed checking for grammar and understandability.
The document needed substantive editing regarding the organization and visual design of the new material.
The formatting and hierarchy of the document had to be examined.
A full copy edit was needed to check for grammar issues: typos, spelling, sentence-verb agreement, usage, and fragmented or run-on sentences.
The manual needed to be checked for accuracy and clarity.
The Introduction and Sections 1 and 2 had updates that needed editing.
Methodology
A minimal substantive edit with moderate copyediting was conducted.
Upon completion, the new document had well-organized information that was clear and easy to follow.
Headings and subheadings were added to guide the reader to specific sections of the material, which was organized in a logical way.
The document's grammar and punctuation mistakes were corrected.
The document’s visual design became more appealing and simple to improve readability and usability.
Customer Contact and Collaboration
To start this project, I met with the owner of Splash n’ Swim to determine the customer’s needs. The owner and I collaborated on big decisions regarding organization, navigation, and styling of terminology. We decided that the information for Levels 1-6 would remain at the beginning of the document because these are the most common swim levels. We decided on a soft style guide for swimming terminology specific to the document and the company.
Substantive Editing
The styling in the manual was inconsistent and hard to read. Some of the skills also needed to be reordered, some were not labeled, and the audience wasn’t always clear- some instructions were written for students and some were written for instructors. The headings needed to be organized into a hierarchy. Some of the pages had too much information so it was difficult for the eye to see where to look.
I fashioned a style guide and made plans for restructuring the information. I added a table of contents with page numbers. I organized and labeled all the skills by level and I also arranged them for readability: the Description, Objective, and How to Teach It sections were all bolded. The Objective label was changed to Student Objective to clarify who the objective was for and all objectives were rewritten for the student perspective. The same voice and tense were applied to all the skills in the Index. I also gave the entire document a visual design revamp.
Editing the headings and hierarchy
Copyediting
The entire document needed moderate copyediting. Some of the verbiage was redundant or confusing. The skills located in the index were written in both the imperative and third-person voices, which made the descriptions difficult to understand. Punctuation, grammar, and sentence structure all needed to be checked.
In the copy editing process, the redundant phrases and extra words were taken out. Some of the verbiage was reworded to be more simple and understandable. Voice and verb tenses were all standardized and all instructions were directed to the swim instructors using imperative voice.
Swim Level 1 Edit
Swim Level 2 Edit
Section 2: Child Development Edit
Table of Contents Edit
Title Page and Style Guide Notes
Toddler Lessons Edit
Final Presentation to the Customer
Upon completion of the final document, I made contact and transmitted the final product to the customer, including a rationale for changes made.
The Splash n’ Swim team can do further research on their instructor’s manual as new and returning swim instructors are onboarded for the new season. They can conduct training sessions using the new manual and collect feedback from the users of the manual to ensure that all safety and instructional procedures are understandable and clear.
Final Table of Contents
Final Section 1: The Curriculum
Final Level 4
Final Toddler Lessons
Final Section 4: Swim Skills Index
Final Section 4: Swim Skills Index, cont.
Resources
Shirley, Constance. (2023). Final Splash n’ Swim Instructor Manual [Unpublished paper]. Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering- User Experience, Arizona State University.
Shirley, Constance. (2023). Final Splash n’ Swim Instructor Manual Proposal [Unpublished paper]. Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering- User Experience, Arizona State University.
Note: The entire Splash n’ Swim Instructor's Manual cannot be provided for proprietary reasons.
Findings
Collaboration with the customer was easy and effective in making useful changes to the old training manual. Once decisions were made on how to organize the manual, the project went incredibly smoothly and it was easy to make the document cohesive.