The process I followed for this project

Photo editing can be a tricky process, especially if you're a beginner. Add an unknown photo editing software you've never used, and you might start running into problems you can't find the answers to.

Photo Variants: User Guide for Beginner Photograph Editors is a user guide that I wrote to address those problems. With new users in mind, I explain:

• photo editing concepts

• the software's features

• how to use these features to achieve photo editing goals 

I wrote all 58 pages in Adobe FrameMaker. Despite that length, this guide is easy to navigate and understand with its:

• simple language

• demonstrative visuals

• scannable, organized formatting (such as clear headings and bullet lists, like this one)

• accessibility features (such as high contrast sans serif font, opaque colours, and alt text)

• clean table of contents and index

My writing process was easy to navigate due to my project management skills. I completed this project in segments, which allowed me to strengthen my writing, proofreading, and editing over time. 

The process I followed for this project

The Criterion Collection appeals to movie lovers who love owning physical media and extra film goodies. However, with their website's long FAQs, their help content isn't as appealing as it could be. 

In an attempt to fix this, I worked with three team members to create an (unofficial) online help centre for this brand. We thoroughly cover topics related to order and shipping, product information, and more. 

We followed the entire user experience (UX) design process, including: 

• creating an informed user persona, story, and flow 

• curating an information architecture, backed by our own research sessions

• priority guides to organize info hierarchy

• coding the website with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

• heuristics evaluations to gauge the strength and accessibility of our website design

• usability studies to collect user research and feedback

We built and presented multiple iterations of this site; this allowed us to build our coding, design, and research skills over time. We also familiarized ourselves with Figma, Miro, and GitHub to streamline our process. 

Working as a team also brought us closer together; it was an opportunity to build rapport, which kept our communication consistent, honest, and fun (even when we were tearing our hair out over learning code for the first time)!

The process I followed for this project

Notion is like a documentation sandbox—you can do all sorts of things in it, which can make it an overwhelming software to use. 

To narrow our focus and create a targeted help centre for Notion, my team member and I created a help centre directed towards students. 

Empathizing with the student experience, we wrote topics that users would benefit from and enjoy. Our writing process was informed by UX writing principles, such as:

• Creating a mini style guide that outlined our brand voice and tone

• Creating a mini formatting guide to standardize our topics' appearances (such as rules for image captions)

• Writing clear, concise, and purposeful help content while still being playful

We used MadCap Flare and Flare Online to create this website. We pushed and pulled content so that we could independently work without overwriting each others' content. With a rapport built on mutual trust and communication, we wrote more than 40 help topics that were easy to digest and truly spoke to the student experience.

The process I followed for this project

I'm an anime fan (shoutout to Haikyuu and Frieren!). I jumped at the chance to write about it in this paper, where I wrote about a media phenomenon and why it changes over time within a different cultural space. 

Anime has a long history of growth and change, both in Japan and the United States, that I needed to document with research. Using my research skills, I efficiently collected relevant articles from multiple informational databases.

Of course, I couldn't use every bit of those articles, so I performed mini content reviews on each one. To see if information from an article was worth including, I asked myself questions like:

• Does this information help the reader understand the goal of this paragraph or piece? 

• Does this information fit into the logical flow of this piece?

• Is this information relevant to the piece?

(Questions like these apply to technical writing as well; this is part of my process in making sure I write clear, helpful content. I promise I didn't include this piece just to mention anime!)

With this curated qualitative data, I wrote an easy-to-follow, informed document that was always backed by relevant research.   

Want to learn more about my process and/or projects (or the anime I've seen)?

kim.t010427@gmail.com