The Writers Gateway

When you create training material or an e-learning course, you do a target audience analysis. You basically think from a learner’s perspective while  designing a training.  You do this so that the learning process is effective.

Now when it comes to creating help manuals or user manuals for applications, do you apply the same principle?

 I have heard people say that when you do Technical Writing, you do not have to understand the user’s mind. All that you have to do is understand how the application functions and document all the tasks and procedures to work with the application. I partly agree with this.

However I believe there is much more than understanding the application and features when it comes to creating  user manuals. When you create user manuals, target user analysis is extremely crucial. When I say target user analysis, I do not mean that you need to interview prospective users of the application. Target user analysis for user manuals has got to do a lot about determining how a user would use the application or product.

How does this matter?  How does it help?

Before we  proceed, download this  N73 user manual.

The  N73 user manual is :

• Nice looking
• Covers all features
• Has all the instructions to use the features

Well, is that not enough?

Let us look at the Table of Contents (TOC)  of the manual.

Here is a snapshot of  the Table of Contents  (TOC) of the N73 user manual:

When you check the TOC closely:

• Topics such as Camera, Media Applications have been given maximum priority because they are placed in the first page of the TOC.
• Topics  such as Making Calls and Messaging have been placed in the second page of the TOC.
• Topic such as Support has been placed in the first page of the TOC.

 Let us shift our focus on the user. When a user uses any phone, what does he/she use it for?  Let us list a few things for which a user might use his/her phone for:

1. Make Calls
2. Message
3. Listen to Music/Radio
4. Take Pictures

Things listed above form the natural workflow of a phone. In any phone, the priority is to make a call and then may be to send an SMS. Music Player and Camera are nice to have, cool features.

Now imagine a user looking for information on how to make calls using N73. He/she has to go to page 63 to learn how to make calls when ironically anyone will want to first make a call using a phone.

One reason why the N73 help manual gives a lot of priority to extra features in the phone is to bring those features to the user’s attention. Many people today buy a phone for its additional features like music player, camera etc. This is valid.  N73 is fairly easy application/product to use and you do not need a help manual to teach you how to use it. So may be it does not matter how you structure information in user manuals for such products.

You have other complex software applications and people feel completely lost and clueless about where to begin and how to proceed.Most people scan user manuals or look for the information they want. In such cases, when the information structure in your user manual reflects the product’s natural workflow, it helps a great deal. Users instantly get a clue about the logical order of working with the features in the product.

 I have tried this and it really works well.

Please leave your comments/thoughts. I would love to hear from you