THE GOODS : Manual Labor : You may not take the time to notice, but technical writers are working to make instruction guides an easy read.
Dick DeBusherre recalls a Christmas Eve spent assembling a miniature parking garage for his 4- year-old son. “There were 200 of these tiny, metal pieces. I was awake from midnight to 4 in the morning cutting myself. By the time the kids got up, I had about 30 bandages on my fingers.” Did the Reseda resident look at the manual? “Not really. I guess it’s a matter of pride, not wanting to ask for directions.”
From “Open, heat and serve” to technical tomes with hundreds of pages, instructions are supposed to help the consumer. And yet we tend to resist, deeming the material extraneous, arcane or downright silly, such as the urgent “Do Not Use While Sleeping!” warning on a hand-held hair dryer. With true pioneer spirit, we usually ignore the pamphlet and plunge into the task at hand, only to grudgingly glance at the instructions when we can’t figure out if we’re working with Slat A or Joist B.
Yet instruction manuals take on a heightened interest in an increasingly complex and global marketplace. Who writes them and do they realize how little regard the consumer pays them? If so, what satisfaction can they derive from derision?
“I think I have a great job,” says Katherine McMurty, who writes books and online information for IBM. “I always loved writing and science and technology, and now I get to do both.” She recently led three writers, a graphic designer and an assistant in writing two 200-page books on computer programming. Although tremendous effort is put into creating usable information, McMurty is aware more people ignore instructions than embrace them.
“We can’t seem to win with the consumer. I’ve had people come up to me and say, ‘Aha! So you’re the reason I don’t know how to use my program.’ It’s just not true. Every technical writer I know is constantly striving to make things better. And the better I do my job, the closer I am to being out of work. Our products are moving toward being so easy to use that documentation will simply be of no use.” Case in point: on-screen menus that teach the consumer how to operate the system, a feature already available on many computers. Still, someone has to create the menu.
Apparently, there is no shortage of work. “It’s a burgeoning field, but not a new one,” says Gwaltney Mountford, president of the East Bay chapter of the Society for Technical Communications, an organization with more than 20,000 members worldwide. “This started out 40 years ago, with engineers. We all know very few engineers can write, but they needed to get their ideas across, and the field was born. For older people, like myself, this is a second or third career. We have a lot of former journalists, former teachers. But younger people wake up these days and say, ‘I want to be a technical writer.’ There are classes that teach them how to do this.”
Knowing that she often toils in vain does not daunt Mountford. “There’s a need out there, and I enjoy filling it. My job is to communicate technical subjects to non-technical people, on everything from computers to the environment to safety and health. It’s not just about the written word anymore, but about page layout, graphics, anything to get the message across.”
With so many writers dedicating their lives to making ours easier, why is the consumer still reluctant? According to John Zurcher, a quality manager for arranged furniture for IKEA, the answer is simple.
“People don’t like to read manuals! They think, ‘Oh, I can put this together--I don’t need to follow these darn instructions.’ Still, we have to assume they are using them, and we take a lot of steps to make it simple and easy.”
Because IKEA furniture is available in 27 countries, their manuals don’t use language, but illustrations. “Words can serve to confuse, but diagrams are easy to follow,” Zurcher maintains. There’s a standard IKEA format, with instructions arranged and numbered, and visuals of what hardware you’ll need at the top of the page, so that little bag of hardware doesn’t look so scary.
Once the manual is finished, the managers have someone completely unfamiliar with the product put it together. IKEA also is receptive to customer recommendations. “If people complain that putting on a door or a side-rail is too tricky, we have the manufacturer take that step, and then figure out a way to package it.”
What’s the easiest product IKEA makes? “Screwing four legs on a table comes to mind.” And the hardest? “Probably entertainment centers. You need to be a little more proficient, and people tend to panic,” says Zurcher.
“The bottom line is you need common sense to stay in this business,” says Zurcher. “And it doesn’t hurt to have a sense of humor.”
Sometimes you need more than a sense of humor--you need a translator too. Studio City resident Timson Hill recalls the Chinese-made clock-radio he received as a gift.
“I was trying to figure out what this wire coming from the side was for, but the instructions appeared to have been translated from Chinese to Sanskrit to Burmese and then into English. They were indecipherable, and hilarious, things like ‘Song out of site, and you no!’ My wife finally figured out the wire was an antenna.”
Kevin Gordon, head of JVC’s product manual team, is well aware how incomprehensible instructions to foreign-made products can be.
“Since our merchandise is made in Japan, you should see the instructions when they come across my desk. It’s initially written--in Japanese--by people who are very much into the product, but maybe not so into making something read logically. I know what they’re writing about, and I can’t understand it. I restructure it so it’ll be clear enough for the average reader.”
Gordon is aware that electronics, and VCRs in particular, often intimidate the consumer. Although he maintains that his own parents couldn’t program their VCR (“I wound up buying them a VCR Plus+, which basically programs itself”), he thinks their “bad reputation” is a sign of their ubiquity.
“People make fun of them because they’re in almost every home--everyone can relate to them. It became a standard joke, that everyone’s clock still flashes ‘12:00’ five years after they’ve bought the unit.”
As a writer of instructional material, it’s natural to assume Gordon’s a devotee, but he’s as guilty as the rest of us.
“I hate to admit this, but aside from the ones I write, I don’t read manuals. I just kind of try to figure things out as I go along. Of course, it usually takes longer to redo the bad work I’ve done than it would’ve taken to read the manual in the first place.”
