Technical Writer’s Mission Is To Write No Instruction Manual, as Far as Possible
If the best instruction manual is the one you can avoid writing, what is the real added value of technical writing?
Think of one of the most successful products ever — the iPhone — and try to remember, from 2007 on, how many instruction manual pages you have read about it.
I guess your answer is: “Zero!”.
Would you say the iPhone is a trivial product? We probably all agree that iPhone is a complex product that instead gives the users an intuitive experience, which is a crucial achievement.
That is where technical writing comes in, reducing its presence as much as possible: the user experience.
Let me show you a path where technical writing can mirror a product’s evolution toward an excellent user experience.
First iteration: 1000 pages instruction manual
In the early stages of product development, the focus is on the problems it solves.
Problem-solving is an attitude that sometimes neglects any other facet than a solution to the problem, resulting in a complicated solution.
The quickest way to go on the market with a complicated solution is to deliver a complicated product that implements that complicated solution.
By definition, complicated things need instructions for the users to exploit them, so technical writers work tons of pages to guide users.
There is a moment — there must be that moment — when the fury of writing and documenting every detail stops, and technical writers look at their output and put themselves in the users’ shoes.
Would I read this detailed and tedious 1000-page instruction manual to get the valuable solution that the product provides?
That million-dollar question is the key.
The product is ready for the market at that moment as it provides the solution it promises. A complete companion instruction manual is prepared to guide users.
Does the cost to learn those instructions value the solution the product offers?
Let’s imagine that a forward-looking product manager decides that a product requiring a 1000-page instruction manual is not viable for the long term. So, the journey transitions to the next iteration.
Second iteration: 100 pages instruction manual
The second iteration starts with a massive investment. The new requirement is:
Automate all the manual procedures in the instruction manuals.
It is a big challenge for engineers. Probably they can not meet the requirement 100%, but automation is possible. So, they start to automate the instruction manual procedures on top of the existing product.
In turn, the automation introduces some new manual steps for the users but much less than before.
Technical writers document those new steps; the instruction manual is now 100-page only!
The user experience completely changed compared to the first iteration. The product solves the same problem to the same solution, but users will perceive it much more as a solid solution than a transformed problem.
Again, in the shoes of the users:
Would I read this detailed 100-page instruction manual to get the valuable solution that the product provides?
The forward-looking product manager decides that the product’s first version is ready for the market and starts selling it. Meanwhile, he shares his vision with the sponsors: a 0-page instruction manual product. So, the journey transitions to successive iterations.
After many iterations: 0-page instruction manual
Steve Jobs would not have delivered even the 100-page instruction manual product. Still, almost all product managers can not afford the necessary investment to reach a 0-page instruction manual product on day one.
The process is simple: iterations proceeding by describing the user experience and automating as much as possible, and so on. Sometimes, reaching the 0-page result is not feasible, but it gives direction.
The 0-page instruction manual will always be a competitive advantage, whatever the market because users are humans, and humans love making as little effort as possible when solving their problems.
Conclusions
You see, at the end of the story, ideally, there is no instruction manual. More realistically, the instruction manual is there as light as possible. In any case, the goal is: to deliver little to no writing!
At the same time, extended intermediate writings — the 1000-page instruction manual — were necessary to get to the best user experience!
The first huge instruction manual showed what to remove to improve the product as the users perceive it: this was the value of technical writing!
Back to the second iteration of the story, the pivotal point is that the 1000-page instruction manual was the core of the new requirement: this implies that:
- The first iteration is a necessary investment, however ineffective it may appear. Otherwise, there would be no precise requirement for the second iteration.
- Technical writing is, above all, the voice of the users.
At the end of the day, when properly used, technical writing is a sharp instrument to get to simplicity.
If you enjoyed my article and found it helpful, please consider joining Medium through my referral link: you’ll support my writing and get into a sea of knowledge. No extra costs!
