For this project, I wrote assembly procedures using videos as source material.
The client recorded videos of their technicians as they assembled a large magnet used for a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) logging tool. I wrote detailed descriptions of what I saw in the videos, then refined my descriptions into procedures. I also made notes to describe photo suggestions for illustrating different procedure steps.
I handed my draft off to an on-site technical writer, who walked through the procedures with the technicians and made corrections. The on-site writer also worked with the technicians to take photos to use as figures. An editor revised and formatted the updated procedures and added the photos as figures. I came back in toward the end of the project to help with final proofreading.
The manual was written for shop technicians. It was originally written in Microsoft Word and published in PDF. I moved some of the content into RoboHelp to refresh my skills…I hadn’t used RoboHelp in about 10 years.
In this sample, the active topics are Purpose and Scope, Equipment and Materials, 1 Prepare the Lead Epoxy, and 2 Prepare the Magnet Assembly Machine. All other topics contain lorem ipsum filler. In the active topics, I rewrote some of the steps and blurred the figures to maintain confidentiality.