atw: Re: The user guide from hell
- From: Michael Lewis <michael.lewis@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2012 13:36:30 +1100
There's no denying that many "bad" user manuals are caused by poor product
design; some people seem to think that bad design can be fixed by good
documentation, whereas in fact bad design virtually guarantees bad
documentation. That said, good design certainly doesn't guarantee good
documentation . . .
Michael Lewis
Department of Linguistics
Macquarie University
On 2 March 2012 09:32, Kath Bowman <Kath.Bowman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> The worst user manual I came across was for a digital video recorder. All
> through the instructions, it kept telling me what to do if things did not
> work as expected. It was hard going, and each task took several pages to
> describe. It was full of “If this happens…” followed by “If that happens…”
> There were no simple steps to follow to do a task. I didn’t encounter any
> of the problems they described. They should have used simple step-based
> procedures, followed by trouble-shooting sections. ****
>
> However, the recorder was as badly designed as the manual, and I got rid
> of the recorder (and the manual) after a while.****
>
> Cheers****
>
> Kath ****
>
>
>
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