To: Miss Enger

From: Mimi Stanley , Joe Laber , Jessika Peterson , George Shuler , Alex Chaput
Subject: Project Proposal
Date: 12 November 2010
This memo is to inform you about the test that we performed for Unit Three. We made an
instructional brochure on the process of throwing a child’s birthday party. This brochure
contains 16 steps that will guide you from party preparation through the clean-up.

Introduction:
Our group chose to compose an instructional brochure for Unit Three. This brochure gives you
step-by-step instructions broken down into certain time frames of when they need to be
completed. Our brochure also contains a checklist of all the necessary items to make your
child’s party a success and memorable. As a means of testing our product we opted to make a
ten question questionnaire. We emailed our questionnaire to five mothers of young children and
used their feedback to make necessary adjustments.

Objectives:

As our introduction states, we will be informing you on the procedures of making your
child’s birthday party a memorable and successful experience. Our brochure will walk you
through 16 detailed steps involving party preparations, as well as suggestions that we have
personally found beneficial. Our primary goal is to provide you with a guideline that, if
properly followed, will facilitate an organized and stress-free way to prepare for your
child’s birthday party. We are offering you a way to make this yearly event an enjoyable
experience.

Our secondary goal for this brochure deals with format and appearance. We want to make
sure that the layout of the brochure is done in a manner that makes it easy to read and
understand. This will be accomplished by having our informative steps well-written and
organized. We feel that if we meet our goal of having our layout done professionally, our
brochure will be visually appealing to the people who will be using it.

Method:
As a class assignment, we set out design a user friendly guide about hosting a child’s birthday
party. The goal was to produce an easy to read and follow pamphlet that was also aesthetically
pleasing. We wanted it to be complete, however we wanted to keep is short enough that is not
overwhelming. In order to do this we followed these steps:
  First we discuss want type of instructions we would like to produce. After rejecting
many ideas that were either not interesting or inappropriate we decided to create a
brochure on how to throw a kid’s birthday party.
 Next we researched the steps needed to throw a successful kid’s birthday party and what
supplies would be needed.
 We then decided what should be included in the brochure from the information we had
found through research and our personal experiences.
 The next step was creating the actual brochure with instructions and graphics. We used
program in Word to do this and it proved a little tricky, however we were pleases with the
brochure one it was completed.
 We reviewed to first draft of the brochure and made our first set of changes to make it
read more clearly.
 We created a usability test that asked participants to review the pamphlet and tell us how
useful it was and what information should be added and generally what they liked and
disliked.
 Then we sent the brochure out to a few moms of young children as that was our target
audience as a test and asked them for their feedback. We decided not to ask our testers to
actually go though the steps as that would be unreasonable because of the time and cost
involved.
 Finally after compiling this feedback and discussing what changes to include and which
ones did not apply we made our last revisions although our original draft closely
resembled the final product.

Results and Discussion:

In our questionnaire we focused on getting feedback on our brochure as a whole.

We wanted to make sure that the layout of the brochure was easy to read, well organized,
and could also be clearly understood. We also wanted to make sure that the brochure is
visually appealing to the person who would be looking for something like it.
In the feedback we received we found that people testing the brochure thought it was very
easy to read, very well organized, and very easy to understand. The testers really liked the
fact that we included a checklist of things that would be needed for the party. They also
liked how we broke it down into time intervals for planning. The five testers, who are
mothers, even stated that they would use this brochure for their own child’s birthday party.
One is even going to use it for her little girl’s first birthday party coming up at the end of
November. They also liked its visual appearance and how it caught their attention.

On the side of constructive criticism, some of the mothers’ suggestions included additions
to make to our itemized checklist. The testers felt we should add a knife for cutting the
cake, an ice cream scooper, and matches to light the candles. Another suggestion was for
additional information to step 14, order/pickup cake. The suggestion was to include
instructions to determine the size of cake required due to number of servings needed.
Overall we feel that we got good, constructive feedback on our brochure. We had just a few
additions to make in order to accomplish our goal of an easy-to-read, well organized, and
an easy to understand brochure. We also feel from the testers’ feedback that we achieved
the goal of our brochure being visually appealing.

Conclusion:
Our plan for Unit Three was to create a professional looking instructional brochure on how
to throw a child’s birthday party. Our goals were to compose it in a manner that is easy to
read and understand, visually appealing, and ultimately provide you with a guideline to
ease stress and keep you organized. As a means of making sure that our product was
achieving our objectives, we performed a usability test which consisted of having five
mothers complete a ten question questionnaire. From our results we found that our critics
came to the consensus that our brochure was visually appealing, easy to read, and would
definitely aid in making sure the party process goes smoothly.