This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons License.
It's been said over and over that people don't read manuals. This is certainly true.
Armed with this fact, most software companies have simply stopped printing them, favoring online help systems instead, claiming they work better, and reduce costs. This is also true.
(Now, if you know me, you're probably glancing up to make sure that I'm actually writing this post, and it's not someone else. Hold on, now...)
This is why the lack of manuals sucks:
Yup. Most people don't read manuals. This is true in the same way that it's true that most people don't play disc golf. But some do, that's why we still have disc golf courses. I'd like to solidify my argument by pointing out that after the software companies stopped distributing manuals with their software, other people started to print manuals for them. At a profit. Now people like me, who play disc golf and (used to) use the term RTFM, end up paying extra for manuals written by someone who reverse engineered the software rather than getting a free one written by someone who helped write the software. Oh, when you buy the software, you'll certainly get a glossy little pamphlet that may claim to be a manual (with a title like a "guide to the features of..."). I got one of those too. It's 20 pages, and has cute pictures. What it doesn't have, is any sort of explanation of features that aren't obviously labeled in the user interface to begin with. I've got five more just like them. These are marketing materials, not manuals. This is a manual. (The man pages on my FreeBSD box are about 25 megs.)
The argument could be made that not printing costly manuals saves money in the software development life cycle. Unfortunately, a much stronger argument can be made that each successive version of Windows cost roughly a hundred dollars more than the one before it, and you had to buy Mac OS X twice: once for the beta, then again when it was actually released.
An argument could also be made that online help is better than a manual anyway. It's searchable, cross-linkable, and adaptive. Unfortunately, it's also written for the type of people who don't read manuals, and those people don't read online help systems, either. Whether it's online or printed, they still ignore it, preferring to ask the nearest computer geek--a person who, until recently, read the manual. Interestingly enough, he doesn't read online help either, because the online help is written for people who don't read manuals, and answers questions that manual readers don't need help with. So, to recap: the online help is written for people who don't read manuals, and the people who read manuals don't read the online help because the kind of questions they need answered aren't covered by the online help, because it's written for the people who don't read manuals, which are the same people who are busy not reading the online help, opting instead to ask the manual readers, who don't know the answers, because there's no fucking manual. The only way for manual readers to get manual-quality knowledge is to either a) use the software enough to stumble upon the answers, b) pay for a sub-optimal 3rd-party book written by someone who used the software enough to stumble upon the answers, or c) scrape knowledge from other manual readers who paid for sub-optimal 3rd-party books.
In a pinch, you used to be able to call tech support, and ask them your question. Why call tech support? Because they had a book with color-coded tabs with in-depth information used to answer frequently asked questions about the software. In other words, the company would pay him $15/hr to read a software manual to me. I don't call them anymore, because the last time I called tech support with a list of questions, the tech support guy gave up after he couldn't find the answers in the online help.
When I have a sufficiently advanced question now, I usually end up in IRC, asking someone who works for the company and is either on the development team, or at least might know someone who is on the development team for the software in question. Then they can ask the guy on the dev team whose job, until recently, was the write the manual. These days, with the money they're saving by not having to print manuals, the company can afford instead to pay him to write features for the software that few people will ever use, because no one knows they exist. In his desk drawer is a big list of features of the software he's writing and how they work, which was printed for him by the company.
In closing, iTunes documentation bites.
[ home - archives - quoteboard - blogger decoder - wishlist ]
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons License.