Final Draft Complete

I finished my social space, it is now an official google community for Party Planning. I gave it a profile picture of balloons (relevant, right?) and posted some things onto the page myself, to make it look more interesting and to give any visitors to the page an idea of what they can post. I also completed the instructions on how to use my social space and added them to my website. I made my instructions based on how I prefer to receive information online. There are a few things that are common in websites that contain tutorials that I find are inconvenient and inefficient.

• Video tutorials/ narrated screencasts: These are irritating to me as they are often either too fast paced, requiring you to pause the video every 5 seconds and switch back and forth between the instructions and the task, or they are too detailed and slow, explaining every minor detail such as how to open and close a tab, as if they think you are from the 18th century. They are also inconvenient if you are at work or on public transport and are unable to play a video with sound, or you have slow internet connection that will only load 2 seconds of the video at a time.
  
• Downloadable PDF file: Although this is more preferable than the previous method, I find that these are also somewhat inconvenient. They either require you to open an entirely new window or tab, or they automatically download a file to your desktop. I find this intrusive as I don't feel it is necessary for a third party site to control your downloads or windows, when a site downloads to my computer I often just delete the download immediately and exit the site - more often than not it is spam, regardless of whether or not the site says it is "instructions on how to post to my site!" If my research on ICT told me anything, it's that you can't trust everyone online, especially if they're trying to convince you to put unknown file onto your computer. A final reason why these are inconvenient is that if you do choose to download the file and open it from your desktop, it requires the use of an external program such as Preview (Mac) or Adobe Reader (Mac and Windows), which may take time to open and cause your computer to run slower (not to mention having to switch back and forth between the external program and your internet browser).

I chose to give my tutorial as a series of annotated screenshots, presented on the same page of my website as the other information about my social space. I feel that this is the least intrusive, simplest form of online instruction. When people decide to contribute to my space, they will not be bombarded with my voice suddenly talking at them and telling them what to do from a narrated screencast; nor will they be put off by new windows popping open, downloads starting and external applications jumping up at them. All of these things I find to be major deterrents that, rather than helping me to contribute to someone's site as a kind gesture, encourage me to abandon the entire endeavour and just read a book.