There’s been a lot of talk about user guides in the blogosphere lately. Kathy at Creating Passionate Users has three recent posts on the subject: Are your users stuck in “P” mode?, Why marketing should make the user manuals, and How to get users to RTFM. All three shed light on the subject from their unique perspective – going beyond helping people understand a new product to creating passionate users and advocates for a product.
User guides have become a major discussion topic here at Clarity. We’re currently in development on three major new products, and we decided to take this opportunity to completely revamp our user guide format.
Who likes to read a user guide? I don’t. Most guides are too long, contain too few graphics and are hard to follow. A great deal of them just end up in the trash. One of the most common complaints we receive from our customers is that our manuals are confusing and hard to understand. Our customers have asked for more pictures and common, everyday language. We’re listening. Each new Clarity product will come with a more straightforward user guide as well as a quick start guide.
An effective user guide should only have to be read once to be understood. User guides should also be laid out so that a customer can find the answer to their question in seconds. Our new user guides will be activity-centered, with illustrations for each activity. In addition, bolded keywords and headlines throughout the text will help people find and understand the information they are looking for.
Quick start guides are another solution we’ll be implementing in our newest products. They will serve as introductions to the setup and most commonly used features of each product. Not only will they be brief– two pages maximum– but they will primarily consist of illustrations. While working on the first of these quick start guides, it was challenging to decide what to keep and what to cut because I wanted to explain every function of the phone. After a lot of discussion and edits, we had a short graphic guide that will allow someone to master the basic functions of the new phone without ever opening the full user guide.
We’ll be giving you a closer look at the new and improved user guide formats over the next few months as we get closer to the launch of these new products.
Posted by Deondra Dodson, Clarity
Technorati tags: User Guide, Usability, Users, Illustration, Products, Clarity,