Tip of the month from PRC
 May 1999

Can you make the manuals obsolete?

Published 5 May 1999

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Tip of the month is edited by Peter Ring, PRC (Peter Ring Consultants, Denmark)
- consultants on how to write user friendly manuals .

If you have corrections, better texts or suggestions for improvements, please let me know.

Thanks to Kees de Bond, AlQuin, for the original idea to this month's tip.

Contents

Why do you need a manual?

"The only reason for making a manual is to compensate for a badly designed product!"
and
"The only reason for reading a manual is because you can't guess the next step yourself!"

Two ways to say almost the same. And for most types of designed products , there is a lot of truth in this. But of course it is not the whole truth for all products. However, most manuals could have been a lot shorter and simpler if the product was designed with more care. Let's take a short look at some of the factors and solutions.

And please note, that this it also aimed at a lot of other products than the ones you are normally writing about, e.g. software, electronics and machinery. And that there are products where there is basically no "design" to work with, e.g. agricultural chemicals, drugs and raw materials in general.

What is "natural functionality"?

Natural functionality is when it is obvious The opposite of "natural functions and steps" is "hidden functions and steps". Here you can NOT guess (or most people can't guess)... If all functions and procedures are "natural" there is basically no need for a manual. Or the manual could be limited to some warnings and technical data. If there are only a few warnings they could be printed directly on the product.

In some cases, hidden steps are deliberately designed into a product to make sure the users read the manual and see the warnings!

Please note that "natural functionality" is most often linked to the users' experience with similar products. Example: if you don't know how to use a fork, you'll never find out, that it has to do with eating. This means, that the "natural functionality" has to do with the culture you have grown up with and live in. And it's a warning against being too sure, that people from other cultures knows e.g. how to use a fork.

Different people have different willingness and capability to guess a potential next step. This is reflected by their position on the vertical axis of the "User map", described in "Tip of the month, January '96" .

Designed products

Designed products are products where the user is supposed to perform some specific procedures designed into the product in order to make it do what it is supposed to do.

Typical examples are software, electronics and machinery. The designing engineers (I'm an engineer myself) are typically very eager solving difficult technical problems, and creating the user interface is just something which should barely work. Or alternatively, they are so eager creating so many different ways to do the same thing that it becomes complicated instead of simple.
 

"Start the product development by writing the instruction manual."

In the late 60'es I worked for Radiometer, a large Danish medical electronics company making blood gas measuring equipment (blood pH, CO2 pressure, oxygen content, etc). The current instruments on the market were all somewhat clumsy, and in order to use them properly -- including making the calculations needed afterwards -- you needed 1 to 3 days' special training. Our marketing manager, Per Nielsen, wanted a new and more user-friendly blood measuring instrument, and wrote its first manual on a napkin as follow:
  1. Open flap.
  2. Inject blood sample from syringe.
  3. Close flap and wait a few seconds.
  4. Tear off paper strip with the printed measured and calculated parameters.
He then handed it over to the R&D manager and said: "That's what the users and consequently I want. Develop it!" Radiometer decided to develop this instrument, which became the beginning of their very strong position on the World market for blood gas analysers today. And the strong position was based on simple user-friendly design. Of course we had to write a larger manual, mainly covering the maintenance procedures. But the text above was the only instructions the nurse needed for making a measurement. And the total manual was quite short, especially when thinking about how complex the measurement and instrument was.

What's needed here is not a detailed manual. Just the core procedure(s) for the normal user. Maybe a few well thought through sketches for the GUI.

"Start the product development by making a working model on a PC!"

You don't need to develop the whole machine at first. Just make a working model of the user interface (e.g. panel or PC screens) with some link-like functions to what's happening when you e.g. push a button. No need for a lot of C++ programming; Visual Basic or equivalent dynamic programming applications are good enough at this stage, and permits you to set up a lot of buttons etc. in a very short time. I have seen this done, and the results are remarkable: A natural functionality.

A further advantage is, that the "working model" is a good basis for the technical writer when starting writing a manual for e.g. a product which is too large to move into the techwriter's office. Most of the manual can then be written from the working model, and then fine-tuned by testing it on the real product.

Finally, most often a model can be at least partially recycled when the next model is to be designed. Examples of recycling are elements and functionality of elements like display and buttons.

"Make sure the designers knows something about user-friendly GUI design."

Proper user-friendly GUI (Graphical User Interface) design is something you can learn, and a lot of universities and other institutions Worldwide are teaching it. (Please note that I don't have any lists available.)

Not-designable products

You can't design e.g. sugar to be more user-friendly, but you can design the packing in such a way that the use of sugar is easier. In the case of sugar it's probably fairly simple, in other cases you've really got to be smart and innovative.

Most bulk products (e.g. a lot of chemicals and building materials) are so price sensitive, and the users know them so well, that the only need for a manual is suitable safety related information + maybe a recepe.

If you disagree with these ideas - or have other relevant points, experiences, or idea +/-, please e-mail me!

Ideas for new "Tip of the month" subjects are VERY welcome, too!

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