Thursday, September 25, 2003

Designing Effective Assembly Instructions I'm reposting this article from elearnspace. I very much like the approach taken by the authors. Teaching people how to use software is very much like teaching people how to assemble equipment, they must get the steps right and they must see the overall picture of what they will end up assembling. JH ____ "We present design principles for creating effective assembly instructions and a system that is based on these principles. The principles are drawn from cognitive psychology research which investigated a person's conceptual models of assembly and effective methods to visually communicate assembly information. Our system is inspired by earlier work in robotics on assembly planning and in visualization on automated presentation design. Although other systems have considered presentation and planning independently, we believe it is necessary to address the two problems simultaneously in order to create effective assembly instructions. We describe the algorithmic techniques used to produce assembly instructions given object geometry, orientation, and optional grouping and ordering constraints on the object's parts. Our results demonstrate that it is possible to produce aesthetically pleasing instructions for everyday objects that are easy to follow." Designing Effective Step-By-Step Assembly Instructions. Designing Effective Step-By-Step Assembly Instructions (Jim McGee). This is a neat resource. The page links to a .pdf file (and video) on how to create assembly instructions for common products (furniture, toys, etc.). I'm not the most mechanically inclined person around...but proper documentation makes it much easier for me to assemble products. While this article is technical, lessons can be gleaned for designing learning. [elearnspace blog] 12:27:17 PM    COMMENT []