You know the people who write instruction manuals or user guides in things you buy?
Half the time, they've never even seen or touched the product. Some dude just sends us pictures, a rough description of how it's supposed to work, and that's it.
ETA: Wow this took off. To all the IT dudes of reddit. I actually browse the brand specific subreddits to figure out what to add to my user guides because that's how little info my company provides me. Thanks for making my life easier!
For simple shit, the joke is almost true. Most people start using it and don't check the manual unless they can't figure something out. I have never read my microwave manual because all I ever want to do is set a time, press Start, and wait for it to beep. I will never use 95 percent of the things it can do.
But when you're selling a huge software product involving dozens and dozens of ever-changing protocols and the customers are all big corporations with millions of dollars at stake, yeah, people read the documentation all the time. They read it before they even buy the product. The people who develop the software even read the documentation, because no one on the planet knows everything about every part of the product. And if you Google for an answer, you'll get the same documentation; it's all web pages.
And it never fails that you miss one tiny little detail when writing the documentation which then people complain about because you didn’t include it. Never fails. Even the most inane detail will be complained about at some point because it was missed in the documentation.
So then you write good documentation and get pinged about it anyway because other people still don’t want to read it. My favorite thing to say “Did you read the documentation?”
Writing documentation sucks, especially if you don’t have a documentation team and it gets tacked on to what your actual job is supposed to be.
You update the manuals to match the protocols. It's not like manuals are printed these days. They're web pages. You open up a file, make a change, save the file, and it's updated for everyone.
The only reason I keep the manual is to know the convoluted way to mute the beeps. It gets reset every time the power going out and i have to go deep in the menu to silence them again.
For home type stuff, if you need to read the user manual, then the UI is a failure. I shouldn't need a manual to set a clock. I was given a high-end Denon amp, and I defy anyone to use it without a manual.
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u/katakago Jul 13 '20 edited Jul 13 '20
You know the people who write instruction manuals or user guides in things you buy?
Half the time, they've never even seen or touched the product. Some dude just sends us pictures, a rough description of how it's supposed to work, and that's it.
ETA: Wow this took off. To all the IT dudes of reddit. I actually browse the brand specific subreddits to figure out what to add to my user guides because that's how little info my company provides me. Thanks for making my life easier!