How to Brew a Pot of Coffee

Visual-only instruction - PSD file

Instructional Design for Visual-only instruction - PDF file

Reflection

     For this assignment, I had to create instruction using only visuals. This was a bit of a challenge for me. In the original instructions, we were supposed to create our own illustrations and not use photos, but the professor allowed us to use photos, for which I am grateful because my illustrations would have been laughably bad. To create the instruction, I took photos with the camera on my phone as I performed the steps in brewing a pot of coffee. I edited the photos in Photoshop, made them approximately the same height, and used arrows to indicate the progression through the steps. It was difficult for me to get photos showing exactly the action that I wanted. Part of the problem was that I was taking the photos myself- it probably would have gone much smoother if I had an assistant taking the photos while I was doing the actions or vice versa. So the quality of some of these photos is not the best, and when reducing the size of the photos so that they fit on the page, I feel that the smaller size makes it a bit more difficult to actually see what is going on in the photos. That being said, I wonder how effective this instruction would be in the real world. This was difficult to design, and I wonder if learners would be able to successfully interpret the images shown. I am sure this particular set of instruction could be improved upon, but I fail to see the ulity of using images-only as an instructional set.