Making a job aid for The International Bunch

In 2024, I worked on an e-learning course for The International Bunch. We wanted to teach copyediting skills to junior marketers, using marketing emails as practical examples. (They've kindly let me use the images here with their permission).

Our company's personas told me our target audience were pressed for time. They weren't getting the support they needed from their managers. They were likely to be rushed and stressed out – and were expected to handle copyedits without training or experience.

We needed to supplement the course with a job aid in our friendly and professional company branding. Learners could use this to quickly refresh their memory and guide themselves through a copyedit at short notice.

The first draft

I started with a list of steps that might go into a professional copyedit – based on my own copyediting training and experience (Fig. 1). I was thorough. I gave detailed explanations of each step. It was very comprehensive. ...It was also 26 points long. That was too many points.

Fig. 1: The first draft. I'll spare you from reading the whole thing.

A panicking, time-strapped junior marketer would look at this list and scream. I'd grouped related steps together into stages, and this helped a little. But the list was still too long and too wordy. We needed a rethink.

Making it visual

A colleague asked me to make the checklist more visually engaging. I went to Canva for some inspiration and picked out a template to get me started (Fig. 2).

I previewed the template in Thinkific (the learning management system we chose) and tested our approved fonts in different text sizes until I had something that looked clear (Fig. 3).

A template checklist. There are six boxes of list items with check circles. Each box has its own heading.

Fig. 2: The Canva template.

Two boxes from the checklist. The text on the right is larger than on the left.

Fig. 3: Testing fonts in the template.

I'd already broken the list down into stages, so I used those for the headings. There were six boxes on the template and only five stages in my list, so I merged the top two headings together.

The two top boxes of the checklist. Their headings have been merged into one longer banner.

Fig. 4: Merging the top headings.

Keeping it focused

I could see there was no room for detailed explanations of each step – so I let that idea go. The checklist was there to quickly remind learners of the process, and help them keep track of their work. As long as the main course content did its job, they would already know how and why to follow each step.

I added a strapline, 'For emails and short digital texts', to:

link the checklist to this course ('for emails')
encourage learners to apply the same principles to similar contexts ('and short digital texts')
clarify the limits of the checklist:
- 'short' and 'digital' because long-form texts, or print documents, might need a different approach
- 'texts' because copyediting images (such as graphs and charts) was outside our scope.

Making it ours

I added the company logo in the bottom-left, to fit in with our brand guidelines.

I needed the checklist to use our brand colours, so I used Canva's automated colour palette tool to create a few versions in our style (Fig. 5).

Three versions of the checklist: pink, green, and yellow. All three use white text on a black background for the headings.

Fig. 5: Three mockups of the checklist in our brand colours.

These all looked okay, but using the same colour across all the boxes made it harder to distinguish between stages.

Instead, I decided to leave the boxes white and make each heading a different colour from our brand palette. This created a clear visual contrast between stages (Fig. 6).

The finished checklist. Each heading has a different pastel background colour.

Fig. 6: The finished checklist.

Letting people listen

This was much better than the old text version! But it's an image, and wouldn't be accessible for screen readers. So I wrote an image description for the checklist.

I tested the description using a screen reader (NVDA) and noticed a couple of issues:

It struggled to pronounce 'copyediting'.
Starting each heading with a number was unclear. Hearing 'one. Setup' without visual context didn't communicate that 'Setup' was the beginning of the list.

So I made some changes to adapt the checklist for audio:

I added a space between 'copy' and 'editing' in the image description.
I named the stages 'Stage 1: Setup' (and so on) in the image description.

This sounded much better! I considered changing the visual version to match, but decided this would detract from its clean and simple look. Making the content clear in each format was more important than complete consistency.

Reflecting on the work

The finished checklist was a big improvement from my first draft.

The short list items and clear visual distinction between headings should make it easier for learners to pick up and use (even while stressed and working to a tight deadline).

I kept a friendly tone while staying professional, and included all the key steps of the process without overwhelming the learner.

I'm happy with what I made here – but I can see some ways I could improve my process. As a small business, we didn't have access to co-designers or a panel of users. But in future projects, I would like to:

start by directly talking to learners to research their needs
test my content with learners, including those who use assistive technologies, to see if it works as intended
measure the impact of my content on learners' performance
iterate and improve my content on an ongoing basis.

Need to make your complex process look simple? Get in touch at contact@rowanpierce.uk.

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