"Life it too short to read the manual"

[TravisE]

I always felt I was the odd one out back when I was growing up for deriving a lot of pleasure in reading manuals to… just about anything. But especially electronic devices. The more information they provided, the better!

Manuals these days, when they exist at all, are generally getting “dumbed down” and typically lack the info I actually need. Another major problem is the increasing number of badly-written manuals, especially those written by people without much of a competent command of the language and which end up being barely decipherable (if at all) to a native speaker. I also hate the proliferation of “picture-only” manuals, which I often have trouble following without at least some verbal narrative. Also annoying are manuals they look really, really thick, only to find they're actually just a two-page manual written in a billion different languages, and then you have to spend more time finding each block of text in your language than it takes to actually read.

The current record of the worst manual I've ever seen goes to our Samsung refrigerator. It looks like they took a machine translation of the Spanish version, left several words completely untranslated, and completely omitted some of the text that should have been there. It's virtually unusable. And the formatting is an absolute mess, like someone spent the whole day having fun fooling around with font and bullet sizes instead of actually, like, proofreading and translating the text. Ugh.

I've noticed that a trend in software-driven devices is to integrate the documentation into the application itself. This is fine as long as it's convenient to reach, well-designed and written, and doesn't get in the way of the user trying to accomplish the task. But a lot of apps have inadequate documentation in any form, especially with regard to features and functions which have technical names and aren't explained at all. And a lot of manuals with physical devices likewise don't explain all the functions well enough (if at all).

Ideally, devices (especially software) are designed with a UI intuitive enough that not much space needs to be devoted to explaining basic operation (at least, once the user has become familiar with similar UIs). But more sophisticated features that someone might not completely understand should certainly be properly documented somewhere.

As far as the amount of time needed to read a manual being a problem, a well-designed manual should be organized so that it's easy to find the specific sections for the features you actually use so that you don't have to read everything (unless you actually intend to use everything). I didn't have HP calculators back in the day, but I did have TI graphing calculators in the '90s, and I generally considered their manuals at the time (and still do) quite well-written and structured, easy to use, and easy to find information. Toward the late '90s, it seems the quality started going down, and their calculators started shipping with “incomplete” manuals, with the full information requiring you to insert a CD-ROM and dig through it in PDF form, which is about the worst possible format for anything being perused on a desktop computer system and read on a monitor (especially back in the 1990s–2000s).

Anyway, I never personally found the time spent reading the manuals to be that big of a problem, as I can read at a pretty reasonable pace. And also because I enjoy it. Or did, at least, back when the quality of the manuals still made them worth reading…