We've all seen examples of instructions gone awry. Here, please post a description of a bad experience you've had with a set of Instructions, identify where the writer went wrong on based on our readings, and speculate upon what the writer could have done to improve your experience. Include links to the bad instructions if available.
Due November 6
We've all seen examples of instructions gone awry. Here, please post a description of a bad experience you've had with a set of Instructions, identify where the writer went wrong on based on our readings, and speculate upon what the writer could have done to improve your experience. Include links to the bad instructions if available.
18 Comments
Jessica Adams
11/4/2012 01:50:15 pm
Jessica Adams
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Steven Varkiani
11/4/2012 04:31:43 pm
The worst instructions I've ever encountered (and continued to encounter).. To start, although the instructions are in a clear and obvious location on the item packaging, the available surface area is very small. As a result, the instructions are far too brief to be of any use.
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Alexandra Frenkel
11/5/2012 10:11:01 am
The worst instructions I have ever encountered was when I used a GPS to direct me to a job interview and it directed me to a dead end street no where near my destination. Although a GPS is very simple and easy you type in your destination and it gives you instructions by talking to you it can also be very confusing an inaccurate. Sometimes the GPS does not account for certain streets or parks and they get confused and lead you somewhere else. A GPS can be very confusing with giving directions because they are slow in telling you when to turn and may even direct you not near destination. This problem needs to be fixed by having the name of the street bigger on the screen, having the voice tell you sooner when to turn and having the product updated so that streets can be accounted for and the GPS can direct you to the right place.
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Jennifer Eguizabal
11/5/2012 12:35:13 pm
I am by far not a very crafty person. However, working with kids, I often have to attempt to do plenty of arts and crafts. A lot of times I go on the website Pinterest for inspirations and tutorials for fun arts and crafts for both my students and myself. Pinterest is filled with great ideas from new recipes to new ways to store your shoes to great makeup and workout tips. It is a very valuable tool when you want to find an idea for a new project. However, many of the tutorials on Pinterest provide picture tutorials, step by step instructions with absolutely no words, or very limited detailed instructions. Recently, for a fall festival at work I decided to attempt to make some fun rainbow cupcakes. The instructions (http://www.spearmintbaby.com/2011/03/rainbow-cupcakes/) I used seemed to be direct and to the point. The author does not number her instructions and presents them with very colloquial dialect. Her audience is not looking for the most detailed instructions, but some grammar, punctuation and numbering would make the directions easier to follow. She also directs the instruction for the actual cupcake bake times and how to make them back to the box of cupcake mix, it would be helpful to have all the directions in one place. She does not mention that the colors will start mixing if left out for too long. Her cupcakes do end up looking amazing whereas mine did not. Although my lack of baking skills could be at fault, the author did not provide the most clear directions. Pinterest projects going astray have become an ongoing joke in the Twitter community. If you search the hashtag "#pinterestfail" on twitter, many people post pictures of how the minimal instructions on some projects have also failed them. I’m glad I’m not alone!
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Rob Steele
11/6/2012 05:20:59 am
The worst instructions I have ever come across were to an outdoors play set. I could not find the actual instructions but here is a link to the website with the actual play set I assembled.
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liat sacks
11/6/2012 05:51:53 am
The worst set of instructions I have ever experienced were given in my "Physics for Educators" class I took last year. The teachers would tell us to think up our own experiments in order to understand certain concepts. They would give us hardly any instructions and expect us to just know what to do. None of us in the class were very science minded, being education majors and we had no idea where to even start. Also, when we would try do as we were told and be creative, we were told we did it wrong and get a bad grade. We would constantly ask for more specific directions and they continued to give us gaps in the instructions.
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Amber Garland
11/6/2012 05:59:36 am
I would say the worst instructions me as well as my family have ever come across would be for my nephew's christmas present. My parents thought it would be a good idea to buy him a motorized John Deere tractor for him to cruise in the yard with. Little did they know that they were getting into on christmas day. The instructions were extremely vague and did not incorporate pictures with parts. So when it would say insert a screw (and there were various screws to choose from) we had no idea which screw they were speaking of. The people writing the instructions obviously did not think of their audience when constructing them. They left out some obvious details which would have been much more helpful to our family and decreased the amount of stress my entire family endured on Christmas.
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Dan Michaelis
11/6/2012 06:32:52 am
I do have a horror story, that is all too real. It has been stretched over the course of the semester, and has struck as recently as today. For many computer science courses we are forced to write a program with the parameters given by a set of instructions from the teacher. The particular teacher I have write now just happens to be absolutely dreadful at stringing together a number of comprehensive, cohesive, and coherent sentences. Whats worse is, he seems to be unaware of this so he chooses to drown our class in dozens of pages of poorly written instructions.
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Aaron Marshall
11/6/2012 06:47:28 am
Over the years I have put together different sets of equipment and have delt with many poorly composed istruction. Some of the instructions that I found most challenging are those that are extrmemly vague and those that imply former knowledge of certain terminology. Some instructions rely on poorly drawn pictures as a means of showing what needs to be done. Other instructions use vague terminology and keep you guessing the entire time you are building the equipment. Lastly, some instructions use specific terms and imply that you already are aware of their definition. All of these instructions have mislead or misinformed me in some way. Usually I would get to the second to last step of the instructions and realize that the entire composition was wrong and I would have to restart the entire process. There have been times when I have repeated this process several times. Instructions should be specific enough to specify what needs to be done but not so specific that you have no clue what they are refering to. Also, the instructions should refer to a accurately drawn picture that benefits the building process rather than confuses the builder.
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ibukunoluwa ajayi
11/6/2012 06:40:39 am
The worst set of instructions I have ever come across was when I bought a pull-up bar for workout. I purchased this pull-up bar online because it looked really good and the website had really good reviews too. When the pull up bar got delivered to me, I discovered that I had to assemble the pull-up bar myself and it had come with about 15 parts and more than 40 screws and bolts. I thought assembling it shouldn't be too bad since it had lots of pictures. However, when I started assembling it, I got stuck and the pictures couldnt help that much because the parts weren't labelled so it was hard to tell what screw goes into what hole. If the package had included more detailed instructions and labelled the screws to the different parts, it would have been easier for me to assemble it. The instructions were so poorly written that up till date, I haven't been able to assemble it. Writing good instructions is very vital because it can be the difference between a good product and a bad product.
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Yit Akyuz
11/6/2012 06:49:12 am
The worst set of instructions that I have encountered in a while were our Matlab assignments for my differential equations class last year. Mathematical lingo is already confusing to begin with but these instructions managed to make them completely incomprehensible. The assignment would tell us to do things that we have never even heard, let alone known how to do. In addition to that, the teacher gave us a "supplement" to the assignment to help guide us. However, the "supplement' completely contradicted with what the book said. To make a good set of instructions you need to be specific and know who your audience is. The Professor should not have expected us to do that.
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Mark Villarrubia
11/6/2012 06:56:57 am
One of the worst set of instructions I've had to deal with was bad in part because of the instructions, and in part because of the hole in the middle of them, where more instructions were supposed to be. The instructions that did exist were specific, but they had a lot of fluff; the specific requirements were surrounded with layers of background description at best tangential to the project. Compounding that was the fact that this programming project's output was specified only by example; the formatting had to be inferred from the incomplete sample outputs, and extrapolated for the parts that were not demonstrated in the samples. This project description could be improved by specifically stating an output format, by making the entire instruction set visible at the same time, rather than adding a part a week in, and by removing the background details to make a cleaner, more readable instruction.
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Tyler Lundfelt
11/6/2012 07:12:40 am
A very common example of bad instructions that arises in my daily life are Computer Science project descriptions. More specifically, project descriptions written by my current CMSC330 professor, who also was my professor for CMSC132. The professor frequently leaves very pertinent information missing from the description, making it extremely difficult to succesfully complete the project or be completely sure of what you are doing. For example, on the project I am working on there have been 4 separate announcements over the course of our time on the project announcing typos, description changes, and changes in the files that we needed to upload.
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Christine Peng
11/6/2012 07:15:38 am
I'm not good with arts and crafts, so I always need to look up instructions when trying to do them. Recently, I wanted to make paper birds. I looked up a video online and a video came up with horrible instructions. Sometimes judging a book by its cover will get you a long way. A bad title is often a good indicator of good or bad content. First, the title of this video is "To Make a Paper Swan/Crane by who else but SeaLion. The title is neither clear nor concise. The instructions follow the same trend. The video is all in a 5 minute video. The pictures are grainy and still shots. There is low quality and it does not show details. The picture is barely identifiable with the lighting, background clutter and picture quality. Finally, the video has poorly worded text that does not make much sense. Her instructions are not clear and concise, making it harder to follow. I was not able to create the bird origami and eventually gave up on her video, and used another one.
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Poorna Natarajan
11/7/2012 09:00:43 am
The worst set of instructions I have received was during the summer when I wanted to connect my laptop to the TV. For what was ultimately a simple task, the instructions were cluttered with examples and terms of technical electronic components without any visual descriptions. Additionally, the instructions included lengthy paragraphs of unnecessary descriptions of the nuances in the wiring and TV components. The poorly structured instructions not only made me frustrated but also made me feel incompetent; I felt inept with technology and began doubting my English comprehension abilities. Eventually, I gave up on reading through the assaulting set of instructions and asked for help. The writer could have made the instructions much more concise and included pictures to the wires referred to in the text.
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Yevgeny Deviatov
11/7/2012 09:04:39 pm
Instructions are a hard subject due to the human nature of things. Most companies take too many assumptions on how educated the user is in the application of a given item. One of the biggest markets right now is with proper "User Experience Design". This field is growing popularly in trying to set a standard for how to navigate websites and applications.
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Constance Moyo
11/8/2012 07:01:16 am
The worst set on instructions came from a software called mastering chemistry. It was used in my organic chemistry class for online assignments. About 80% of the homework exercises required us to use graphics to draw molecules and bonds. There was a short video as introduction to the software, unfortunately the video made absolutely no sense. It lasted 5 minutes, it was just a voice explaining to us how to use the graph board and they gave just one example of a chemical reaction. they could have given more examples and taken the time to make longer videos with more details. During the entire semester everyone kept complaining and finally the professor had to apply a generous curve to the homework grades.
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10/11/2016 07:53:43 am
My interview with Jonathan Bailey, the man behind Plagiarism Today, a site that aims to educate copyright holders and web content publishers about plagiarism-related concerns.
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