ROBIN F. RICHARDSON
TECHNICAL WRITER
Technical Writing, Online Help, and Web Design
Below you will find examples of my specialty: writing instructional material. These projects include both a print manual and online help systems. Also, under Web Design is the prototype for this portfolio website hand-coded in HTML and CSS.
To view a project, click the title or associated image.
Technical Writing
CRG P&L Program Administrator Guide
I used InDesign to create this 79-page manual on how to update Colton's Restaurant Group's Profit and Loss (P&L) Program every financial period. The P&L Program is an Excel spreadsheet application that must be re-saved and re-linked to other workbooks every month before it is distributed to restaurant managers to track sales and costs. The manual was created as part of an independent study and will be used to train the next administrator of the program after I leave CRG to begin my career in technical writing.
I enjoyed writing and designing this guide because it allowed me to put into words the job I’ve been doing for years and provide the tools necessary for another person to do it, too. The person at CRG who will be taking over this job tried using the manual to update the program herself. This informal usability test helped me see areas where I needed to clarify some specific issues, such as making sure the user understands which set of instructions to follow for each period of the year. The experience clarified for me the importance of testing a document before finalizing it because it is easy to make incorrect assumptions about how a user thinks and what he or she already knows.
Web Design
Portfolio Site Prototype
I designed and hand-coded this website to be the prototype for my writing portfolio. I wrote it in HTML, CSS, and just a smidge of JavaScript as a final project for Writing on the Web, a graduate seminar focused on the social and technical concepts of online writing.
I chose to create my final portfolio in Wix because I did not have the time learn what I needed to in order to make the site look and operate like I wanted. However, though my final portfolio site is not hand-coded, learning some basic coding was a valuable experience I will likely use at some point in the future. I learned most of the code on Codecademy.com, but I also consulted the internet and books (and Dr. Martin) to learn what I needed to make it look how I wanted.
This project also gave me practice in persuasive writing as I wrote content that aimed to convince a potential employer to hire me. Considering audience and building ethos through the writing itself were key to making the portfolio prototype successful.
Online Help Systems
CRG P&L Program Administrator Online Help System
Using RoboHelp, I designed this online help system as an accompaniment to the print version of the P&L Program Administrator Guide. The help system includes video tutorials to show how to troubleshoot broken links between Excel workbooks. Recording these videos proved to be the most challenging and time-consuming part of creating the help system. I wrote scripts and edited them as needed over the course of recording the videos, and I recorded them repeatedly until I was satisfied that the script and screen recordings of each video were clear and effective at teaching how to perform each step. I wanted the voice recordings to be clear and pleasant-sounding and the videos to align with the words being spoken. I recorded each video a number of times to get them all just right.
Creating the online help system and the videos revealed to me the challenges of working with multimedia. Editing scripts, aligning screens within the confines of the video recording area, recording and re-recording, and working with uncooperative software were all part of the process. I will be creating tutorial videos for my current job, and the experience of creating them for class has prepared me for what is involved in producing them.
Canva Online Help System
The Canva online help system was a group project for Writing Software Documentation, a graduate seminar, and I served as Project Manager of our four-person team. Canva.com is a website for creating infographics, posters, flyers, and a variety of other graphics projects. Our team collaborated to plan the steps in the process of designing the online help and break down the different areas that needed to be created by each team member. I communicated with the team regularly via email and team meetings so that everyone knew where we all were on the project. I was also a writer, editor, and I created the table of contents as well as some screen shots.
Using RoboHelp, we designed the help system to teach students in another class how to create infographics with Canva. To polish and add more content to the help system, two of us returned to the classroom over the summer to make changes to the system that made it a more complete and portfolio-ready project. One of the main features I added to the project was a screen shot of the main Canva design page with labels and a key that explained what each tool did. We also added an explanation of the Canva introductory tutorial that the program takes users through when they first open an account, as well as made a few other changes to make the language and format of the help pages more consistent.