iFixit: Computer Repair by Dummies, for Dummies
In my sophomore stint, my technical communications course encouraged practicing business workplace conduct by having students work within the guidance of an associated company known professionally as iFixit. The assignment, leading students to cooperate in the production of repair manuals, challenged students with working within iFixit’s requirements, maintaining efficient and open communication with the company, and producing quality work to their website’s professional standard. Designated as a three-student group project, proper implementation and execution of this project necessitated efficient doling of responsibilities between working party members. And as the project would ultimately aid an end user, the demand for instructional writing for unfamiliar audiences required iFixit contributors to balance the jargon of their technical writing with the casualty of layman’s terms, all the while maintaining the company’s professional and formal standards.
Our particular group was tasked with writing and uploading repair guides for the Dell Inspiron 17R laptop, model 5721. This particular assignment entailed the inclusion of official Dell manuals, as well as the composition of a troubleshooting guide and over ten step-by-step repair guides for individual parts. Accurately describing the repair process required that student contributors possessed insider background knowledge of a device’s operation, meaning that the repeated disassembly and reassembly of the laptops’ components were common for students to more accurately represent the repair processes. For the sake of uniformity across the company’s entire database, iFixit repair processes require the use of the official iFixit toolkit, so learning the names and intended uses of each tool was essential to keep readers organized throughout the repair.
Following iFixit guidelines, the photography process was incredibly intricate. Every step of the repair process was required to be supplemented with an 800x600 resolution image if the step in action, complete with a clean white background and indicators implemented within the iFixit website. The need for professional-grade lighting equipment, high-resolution cameras, and a uniform backdrop required the reservation of a specially designed photography studio on campus, which could only service one group at a time.
As with any major project, many obstacles were encountered and subsequently managed by the contributing teams. My group in particular was increasingly difficult to organize as the project developed, despite a successful project being in our collective best interests. In many instances, the process of meeting to draft instructions or retake photoshoots often conflicted with group member A’s court appearances or group member B’s personal affairs, to which I had presumed was work. As a result of scheduling conflicts becoming ever too common, I had taken it upon myself to bear much of the load when it came to the physical output of the assignment.
Producing most of the repair guide myself meant that I took responsibility for the drafting and uploading the sets of instructions, editing photographs to meet iFixit’s standards, and further formatting the webpage, such that the guides for each part were properly organized and displayed. The website’s statistics support my dedication to the work produced, claiming that, between two prior groups of student contributors (totaling four students) and three iFixit administrators who have access to the Inspiron 17R page, a 33.33% majority of the content ownership across the entire device is in my name. Coincidentally, my two groupmates do not appear on the site as contributors.
It is also worth mentioning the laborious process that was uploading photographs to iFixit’s website. Low initial image quality forced our group to schedule retake sessions in the photography studio on at least two separate occasions. Subsequently, our initial photo uploads were given indicators, like circles to identify the location of certain parts or arrows indicating which direction to move a part, that were custom and non-uniform to the type of indicators iFixit used, which required additional editing before the final publications were made..
While the project itself was troubled, the final product was eventually successful and very highly refined. The email discourse maintained between myself and iFixit staff encouraged punctuality and transparency in professional communication. It was also a unique experience to contribute to a piece of academic coursework that has a positive effect on the end user. At the time of writing, our guides for the Inspiron 17R have helped approximately twelve-hundred individuals repair their laptops themselves since our contribution to the website in May of 2019. There is special and often overlooked value when education can contribute to society and count for more than just a letter grade.
A partially disassembled Inspiron 17R, examplary of the iFixit standard for sample photography.
