atw: Re: The user guide from hell
- From: Bill Parker <bill@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2012 12:59:01 +0800
My vote goes the "Swedish" shop owned by Dutch interests. Not so much words as
diagrams - even one close up have helped tell the difference between a dowel
and a screen.
Bill
On 02/03/2012, at 6:32 AM, Kath Bowman 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
>
> From: austechwriter-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:austechwriter-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Howard Silcock
> Sent: Thursday, 1 March 2012 10:38 AM
> To: austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: atw: The user guide from hell
>
> It occurred to me (while looking at the online user guide provided for our
> phone system and thinking about others that I've seen for home appliances)
> that it might be an interesting and instructive exercise to come up with the
> attributes of a 'user guide from hell'.
>
> Some that occur to me immediately are:
>
> It applies to a number of different models, which are distinguished only by a
> very hard-to-find identifier on the product or its packaging, and which have
> quite different configurations. Pictures (and all the most useful features)
> all relate to one of the models you don't have.
> It contains text in a very large number of languages. The English version is
> somewhere right in the middle and appears to be much shorter than many of the
> others. It's written by someone with very little knowledge of English.
> Most of the text consists of warnings against using the product in the most
> bizarre ways (like the user guide for an iron which warned against ironing
> clothes while you're wearing them) and is clearly there only to guard against
> lawsuits.
> Other topics given prominence are congratulations on buying the product and
> promotions for other products.
> Instructions are grouped under headings that presumably make sense to the
> manufacturers but are meaningless to the users and often use jargon (e.g.
> 'Softkey Definitions' - most users would have no idea what a 'softkey' is -
> or 'Utilities' or 'Advanced Topics'). There's no index or table of contents.
> Alternatively (or in addition) there's a picture of the product with a large
> number of numbered callouts and the only instructions are listed in the key
> to the callouts.
> There are references to other publications from a website. That website
> doesn't exist.
> Any other suggestions?
>
> Howard
>
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