Is it just me or are most product manuals we get pretty much worthless? Even the html based ones do little more than list "features" and how to turn them on and off. My new cell phone, this Lingo service, my fax machine, etc. I'll dig through the menus on a product, come across an option I've never heard of, look it up in the manual and only get a description of where to find that option in the menus. Thanks. I guess it's asking too much to get an xplanation of what that feature does or how it might interact with other settings. It's really frustrating.

Just trying to get my fax machine to work with VoIP, I had a whole page of collected tid bids I had found on the web. Very little was from an tech support persons or manuals. It got to the point I had to collect all the info and build a small tutorial just so that other people out there might get to live without the headache I had to go through to get this thing working.

I'd be set if someone did the same thing for my cell phone!

Have you guys have similar experiences with consumer electronic goods?

I wouldn't know, not having looked at a manual in years. They're always such crap.

It's definitely a trend, and if you think about it, it's logical consequence of consumer product manufacturers dealing with shorter development cycles and fighting to be the first to hit the market. It's easier to pay a bunch of outsourced telephone jockeys to answer tech support questions than it is to get someone to develoop quality documentation. Furthermore, products change so quickly and frequently now that you could start printing the document, ship out the product, and by the time it reaches the consumer, the docs are already out of date. Another factor is probably that most electronics nowadays come from other countries, so manuals often have to be translated. Any time you introduce another step in the process, it reduces the effectiveness, and takes longer to get done.

Anyway, I don't see this trend reversing, because demand drives supply, and nobody really pays more for better documentation.

I guess you learned the lesson long before I did!

But sometimes when I get a new toy, yet don't have time to check it out, I'll settle for browsing the manual. But it's been a long time since that has actually helped out!

EDIT: It's kinda funny that you don't RTFM but you write the FAQ!

Have you guys have similar experiences with consumer electronic goods?


I actually had a good experience with a manual recently. I purchased some very inexpensive software on eBay (Floor Plan 3-D v8) for eight and a half dollars, and there was a PDF file on the CD that printed out 196 high-quality pages loaded with clear diagrams, instructions, and explanations.

tanstaafl.

The last really good manual (not reference manual mind you) was for TiVo. The Philips DSR6000 (same manual for a number of others, including DSR7000 and Hughes GXCEBOT, etc...) Really good read and informative. Not necessarily the best when you want very quick referennce on a specific function/command.

Its VERY difficult to keep up with documentation when you change software rather quickly. The best thing to do is to have a plan that includes the documentation and a long-term product lifecycle that doesn't see the product radically change such that the manual is obsoleted. Being able to leverage and add to an existing manual like the source code of the project itself is ideal. this can become very complicated with consumer-type goods with short lifecycles.

Bruno

The best manual story I heard was from a guy that sold pianos at one time. The piano was made in Japan (I believe, maybe a Yamaha). He was reading the instruction on how to put the legs on the piano and it said to “Fu_k the legs into the piano.”

He said he could just imagine the writer (apparently not fluent in English) asking someone what the word for “screw” was in English.

Oh, that's classic. ROFL