A better user manual

August 16, 2009 6:31 AM

A better user manual. As a demonstration, I want to rewrite a few poor product user manuals or directions intended for a nontechnical audience. What user manuals or directions have driven you nuts and would benefit from a thorough rewrite?
posted by markcmyers to writing & language (14 comments total)

A classic example are the "manuals" and user documentation that comes with most cable TV gear. The remote for my system's digital set top boxes have 57 buttons, and an 18 page "manual" to tell you how to program the damn thing to operate your TV, DVR, VCR and the cable box itself. All this, for an appliance (the set top box) that, further, has several dozen software menus, and another 25+ page "manual" of its own.

Hasn't anybody designing cable TV equipment ever seen an iPod, or read the Apple User Interface Guidelines? Sheesh. Why should a remote control have more than 3 or 4 buttons, period? It would be trivial to put an IR sender unit in the cable box, and let the TV, VCR, DVR and accessory control commands now coming from the nightmarishly designed multi-colored, 57 button remote come from the cable box, from menu selections provided on the TV screen by the cable box, like an iPod provides.

But, this might require a complete product redesign, as well as a manual re-write to solve.
posted by paulsc at 6:43 AM on August 16

If you are doing this to build a portfolio for a new career as a technical writer, I'd suggest that the best manuals to "re-write" are actually the ones that don't exist at all.

A tech-writing joke: Bad documentation is like bad sex. It's bad, but it's better than nothing.
posted by Houstonian at 7:00 AM on August 16

DENON!
I'm an AV dork and usually manage to get things hooked up and configured without a manual and can make changes without a manual.
Not so with Denon products.
I have looked at their convoluted and confusing manuals to operate their products (mainly AV receivers) and I don't have any idea who can make heads or tails out the information the way it is presented to you. Mainly, I'm thinking of this(pdf link), a manual to (discontinued) AV Receiver AVR-989. They could really use an usability expert from the likes of Apple!

Also, the Logitech Harmony software & help system thats all integrated together confuses me to no end as well. I always find it very overwhelming and time-consuming to make a few minor changes to the remote setup.
posted by ijoyner at 7:24 AM on August 16

Panasonic DVD recorder, Model No. DMR-EZ47V and DMR-EZ475V
IANASP, but we've had this thing running our TV set for 2 years now and hate it more ever day.
But we can't figure out how to use 90% of its features because the manual is so mind-numbingly complex.

How about an overview of the features to start with?
posted by SLC Mom at 7:31 AM on August 16

This is a toughie since, in my experience, bad manuals tend to spring from bad product design/engineering in the first place. Especially designs that are over-engineered to a fare-thee-well. Paulsc's example of the cable remote, for instance. The documentation may be horrific, but its horribleness is due to poor engineering/design of the system in the first place.

As a broad generalization, consumer electronics that have multiple layers of features and functions tend to have the worst, or most overly-technical, instructions/documentation. Camcorders come to mind immediately.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:37 AM on August 16

The "open source" movement is thoroughly littered with user documentation which is nearly useless to any except the elect. For instance, I'd love to see someone write a good manual for Apache.

But that wouldn't be a small project.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 7:41 AM on August 16 [1 favorite]

Everything ever made by casio.
posted by filmgeek at 7:54 AM on August 16

Eric Raymond famously doesn't think much of the documentation for the Common Unix Printing System, or, for that matter, of the software's user interface. As Thorzdad points out, his issues are as much poor product design, as they are bad documentation, but this really reinforces CP's point about the quality of open source documentation, in general.
posted by paulsc at 8:03 AM on August 16

Ikea's very small, very difficult to read pictorial-only manuals.
posted by mdonley at 8:10 AM on August 16

Most manuals for A/V gear just plain suck. Why?

(1) They spend pages and pages discussing some minor, proprietary feature that maybe 0.5% of their customers will ever use but gloss over useful yet "advanced" features in one line.
(2) They frequently are incomplete - I've discovered options and features of both my TV and receiver that aren't listed in the manual.
(3) They go into step-by-step detail of HOW to do something, but make no mention of WHY you would use something. (You don't need to tell me, in 10 steps, how to scroll down and press "Select/OK" but I would like to know WHY I would want to activate PMLK6 8.4 TURBO)
posted by wsp at 8:18 AM on August 16

Pick up any cheapo Sakar product in walmart - most of their digital cameras in there are made by Sakar, especially the really cheap ones. Their user manuals are in very, very poorly translated Chinese (Chinglish, as our engineers call it) and they are uniformly an abomination.
posted by Medieval Maven at 8:27 AM on August 16

I have to agree with Chocolate Pickle. Apache specifically, but any large open-source project typically has awful documentation. Postfix's documentation is horrible. Unless you already know what you're doing, of course.
posted by odinsdream at 9:07 AM on August 16

Pretty much any manual with supersimplified line drawings intended to demonstrate how to assemble the product drives me nuts.

For some reason, it's often very difficult for me to match up the line drawing with the object.

Does that circle on the line drawing correspond to this circular knob? It's got to, right? There's nothing else really circular... but if that's true, then what the hell can this rectangle on the drawing possibly be? The only way I see a rectangle vaguely of that shape is if I turn the whole thing 180 degrees and look at the other side, where there's a slide-in tray, whose face kind of looks like that rectangle... but if I do that, I can't see the circular knob anymore! Wait a minute, but I can see a tiny circular logo, barely visible, and it's sort of where the diagram shows the circle, relative to the rectangle, if the rectangle is the tray... but they can't possibly be intending to denote this tiny little circular logo as one of the prominent features, can they? And this arrow, is it pointing from the rectangle? Or this little triangle next to the rectangle? And what the hell is it supposed to be pointing to?

Ugh, I hate those things. Am I the only one? Sometimes I feel like I have some sort of mental handicap dealing specifically with these things. I'm not incompetent at putting things together in general; it's just these friggin' drawings.

Manual designers: If you must include something like that, please use a photo. Even if a photo would be too busy to show the arrows and such against, at least show a photo of the product in the same orientation as the line drawing, next to it.
posted by Flunkie at 10:10 AM on August 16

Here's something with a very wide potential audience: OpenOffice, the free office suite that can replace MS Office, if only people could quickly figure out how to do all the things they've learned how to do already in the pricier software. A manual or user guide with incredibly well-focused and target chapter titles (maybe printed right on the cover / home page) could be exquisitely successful.

A similar and potentially even more popular open source program would be The Gimp. There are so many people who need to do some image editing -- whether to put up their own photos on Facebook, or pictures of their stuff on Craigslist, or who want to sell or describe things on their own e-commerce web sites or blogs -- and The Gimp is just sitting right there, available on all (I think) platforms, ready to help them. But everybody knows Photoshop, and The Gimp isn't going to be useful to people until they know that it's easy for them to use it.

Yes, there are other ways of editing photos, but full-version Gimp is free whereas full-version Photoshop is hundreds of dollars.

Good luck. If you tackle either of these, I'd love to know about it.
posted by amtho at 10:56 AM on August 16