You are more likely to write an effective manual if you have a good understanding of who your customers are and what their major use cases are. If you have the opportunity to watch a user test your product, it can help you in determining how customers are interacting with the product and where they get stuck and have problems.
Writing these documents is not an easy task. Your customers are counting on you for help as they rely on the information present in the instruction manual. Gather your peers around and start working on the document collaboratively. One person could be in charge of writing it while others review it, help organize the information, and create visual assets for the user manual.
Outline the flow of the manual into different sections, or parts. Think about breaking it up into categories based on what users may search for. Make sure that the instruction manual is in a smooth flow and covers all and in-depth processes from start to finish. Organizing the information is important to avoid confusion amongst the readers and make it an easy read for them. Now that you have everything outlined and organized with a clear structure in mind, the next step would be to start writing!
Always keep in mind that the primary purpose of user manuals is to help users complete tasks and solve problems. Thus, giving clear, to-the-point instructions help your customers get up to speed with your product or solve their issues with it quickly.
Always using numbered lists for instructions and keep the content concise are some great practices for writing a good manual. Adding a table of contents to your instruction manual is a must.
If your instruction manual is heavy on pages, the importance of having a table of contents increases exponentially. The table of content provides navigation to the reader and helps them go to a particular topic quickly. Since customers are not looking to read your manual from start to finish and are just looking to solve a particular problem or learn about a topic, adding a table of contents helps them save time and effort.
Using a document editor that automatically creates a table of contents around headings and subheadings is a great way to go about it. Instruction manuals are well, boring. They are filled with text and are not very engaging. On top of that, visuals are processed 60, times faster in the brain than text. It is critical that the instructions are easy to read and are understandable by all users. Many user manuals have instructions that are incomplete, incorrect, or simply have no bearing on the actual product.
Here are some guidelines to help make instructions easy on the user. In addition to effective instructing, the use of colour, the text and fonts used, and the icons and graphics can all either make for an easy experience or can derail the user.
Here are some suggestions. User manuals are used in many different kinds of environments: they may be used indoors or outdoors, they may be used with good light or with dim light, they may be used in a comfortable and user friendly setting or in an environment that is hostile or even dangerous.
Here are some basic guidelines to ensure your user manual will survive actual use. Find out more on our 3-day, user experience immersion seminar. Philip Hodgson bpusability on Twitter has been a UX researcher for over 25 years.
His work has influenced design for the US, European and Asian markets, for everything from banking software and medical devices to store displays, packaging and even baby care products. More details. This article is tagged layout , navigation , user manual. See all videos. Join our community of UX professionals who get their user experience training from Userfocus. A table of contents will also help the reader locate answers to the questions they are looking for.
If the user manual is fairly long and detailed, consider adding an index at the end of the document in addition to including a table of contents at the beginning.
This will make it easier for readers to quickly locate specific sections of the document related to a question or need they have at a particular time. Once you think the document is ready, get someone else to review and edit the document. Have them actually try to follow the instructions as if they were a member of the target audience. Get feedback from them about the content or format of the overall manual and whether the instructions need any adjustments.
Writing instructional manuals is one of many types of business writing. Knowing how to write a user manual is an important skill for writing professionals who work in corporate or educational settings. Now that you know how to write a manual, take the time to review some examples of technical writing assignments.
All rights reserved. Step 1: Identify the Audience Understanding who your audience is can be half the battle when writing a user manual. Step 3: Identify the How-To Steps Start your first draft by making a list of all the steps that someone needs to follow to perform whatever task s the manual is supposed to explain. Step 4: Formalize the Written Steps Take your latest draft and use your technical writing skills to translate them into the how-to portion of the manual. Step 5: Develop Appropriate Graphics Once the steps have been laid out, consider where graphic elements can help make it easier for readers to follow and apply them.
Step 6: Write Other Sections of the Manual Once the main part of the instruction manual the actual instructions has been written, focus your attention on crafting the other sections of the topic. The introduction of a user manual usually begins with a message of appreciation to users for selecting the product and a general product overview.
General text general text general text. In the EU, depending on the kind of product, it might be allowed to provide only the safety information in printed form and the rest of the information online. Action: conduct a risk analysis and craft your safety messages using this template.
Now I asked Philip to create all other content, such as the procedures, technical specs and legal information. Again, for most product groups there are paid templates available which might make the work easier. These templates contain all legal texts, mandatory disposal information, copyright statements and comply with the IEC standard on user instructions.
When using the template for crafting the safety messages, I asked Philip to indicate whether a safety message is a supplemental directive, or should be placed as a grouped, section or embedded safety message.
A user manual should give assistance to people by providing information about how to use a product. The crafting of meaningful headings is one of the tools that aid users in finding information.
Philip has now created the draft version of his user manual, using the user manual template. We call this version the textual content design. As Philip has a business partner and a developer with in-depth technical product knowledge, I asked Philip to let them review the work so far. Both his business partner and the developer provided feedback. Philip used this feedback to optimize the user manual. Action: Send the draft version of the user manual to anyone within your team who might be able to deliver feedback.
Ask them to combine all feedback into one document before sending it back to you. This stimulates discussion of your team members and prevents disagreement at a later stage. Once the user manual has been reviewed and optimized, the texts are more or less definite. This means that any images can now be created and added to the content.
The reason to wait until the texts are ready is that creating or editing images can be time-consuming. As images should support, replace, or augment text, you want to wait to create them until the texts are final. Images in user manuals may include illustrations, photos, screenshots, tables, diagrams and schematics. I advised Philip not to use photos as a cheap alternative for illustrations. Often, photos are not as informative because they contain too much information.
Besides that, photos can make a user manual look messy. Before we start making it look nice and translate the content, we want to be sure that the content is complete. You can adjust the User Manual Template in MS Word by adding a company logo and adjust the font, colours et cetera, but that might have limitations.
When you know how to work with Adobe Indesign, or are willing to learn to work with it, this will offer you much greater design possibilities. Action: Adjust the User Manual Template to fit your brand identity, or download the InDesign user manual template and adjust it.
Philip now has both the content of his user manual Word file and the user manual template InDesign file. The content needs to be put into the InDesign template. This is called Desktop Publishing. Action: place the content from your Word file into the Indesign template.
If you decided not to use the InDesign template but stuck to the Word file, then you can skip this step. Depending on the market in which you are going to sell your product, you might need to translate the user manual.
In general, a user manual should be available in a format that is easily accessible to the user. That can be printed, or used online or on-device. In the European Union, for some product groups, it is still restricted to provide the user manual printed with the product. However, as of April , the instructions of many product groups may be delivered in a different format rather than in print. There is one exception, however.
Safety information shall still be delivered in paper form along with the product. Besides that, upon request from a consumer, a paper user manual should be made available to the consumer. The best part of all this is that you can get the same results as Philip did by following this step-by-step process on how to create a user manual.
And he did this without any knowledge of technical writing. The results are as follows: A manual that enables 1st run of product to ship on time with no delays and passing customs without any problems. I have listed this information below. What is the definition of a user manual?
Other names, or other forms of a user manual, might be: User guide Technical documentation Instruction manual Operational manual Training manual Quick Start Guide Installation manual Maintenance manual Software manual Besides the primary goal of a user manual to assist a user , secondary goals could be creating a better user experience and meeting legal requirements.
What information should be in a user manual? Based on the first template for Philip, we have developed templates for the following product groups: Medical Devices Toys Machinery Electronics What formats does a user manual have?
Through the following links you can download a user manual sample for documentation: IKEA installation instructions Jura user manual Step 2 Identify the User s of Your User Manual Template Ok, so now Philip has some basic knowledge about user manuals.
Is the product used professionally or mainly privately? What other technical experiences do they have? What describes the user? I have created a template that contains the questions. I asked Philip to fill out the template. I did this for Philip. If the problem is too complex, you could break it down into chunks. Action: To define the structure of your user manual: Copy the content from the Lifecycle [product name] tab to the ToC [product name] tab.
On the ToC [product name] tab , replace product name with your own product name. Add a column to the left. If applicable, organize your sections logically. Determine what topics will become chapters by adding chapter numbers. We will add some more chapters in the next step. Determine what topics will become paragraphs by adding the section numbers. Determine what topics will become sub-paragraphs by adding the subsection numbers. Step 5 Create Meaningful Headings Each topic in the user manual gets its own heading.
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