Caught Up in Handbook Hell

Source: Unknown

1  Manuals in "Engrish" which come with Japanese computers baffle users, but even British companies produce handbooks that should be described as implanation – the opposite of explanation, as you end up understanding less than before.

2  There are the classic cases which give a long list of instructions and only after a page of careful description add "But before doing that be very careful to...".

3  Companies selling products accompanied by a manual often inflict more unnecessary pain on themselves from dissatisfied customers than they realise. It is not only that people get cross when they cannot follow the instructions, though they do, but when the gibberish becomes impenetrable they try to do what the prose seems to mean.

4  If that causes things to go wrong they blame the manufacturer.  And rightly so. The kit may be sound but without adequate instructions it is useless. The Medical Research Council's Applied Psychology Unit many years ago discovered some of the problems. It found, to nobody's great astonishment, that people understand simple declarative sentences most easily.

5  So a statement such as "press button A when the red light begins to glow" can be followed by anyone.  If the statement has to be qualified, the instruction should still start with the principal action, with the conditional clause added afterwards.

6  In other words, people find it easier to understand "Do not turn the green knob if the amber light is flashing" than "Unless the amber light is flashing you may turn the green knob". Indeed, the word "unless" regularly causes confusion.

7  The reason is thought to be the tendency for people to convert that sort of conditional into something more straightforward: so the instruction "do not ...unless" is readily transformed into "do... if"; but then the instruction to do something unless, has the more complex rephrasing by the reader into the instruction not to do it if....

8  The moral is that sentences should be short and start with the action.

9  It is perhaps hardly surprising that customers tend to ignore instructions. Experience of ingenious opacity has prompted many to see if they can start using the product immediately.

10 At that stage they have only themselves to blame and must rely on Allen's Axiom: if all else fails read the instructions.

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© Christian Lassure - EFT
Le 26 septembre 2007 / September 26th, 2007 - Complété le 5 octobre 2009 / Augmented on October 5th, 2009

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