What is the first thing you do when you buy and bring home a new tool, gadget, appliance, or anything?
If you are like most people, you open the box, plug it in and throw away the instructions. I’m sure that is why you will usually find a quick start guide with every new electronic thing you buy, to go along with the full booklet of detailed instructions.
When I started my technical career, I actually got to prepare one of these quick start guides for a medical device that we were designing at the time. These guides take a lot more time and attention to detail than you’d think, since as a technical writer, I know everything about the product, but the user opening the box doesn’t have a clue about what all the parts are for, and how they go together.
If you’ve ever stopped and asked someone for directions while travelling, or if you’ve ever given directions to someone in the past (I don’t think people even do that anymore) you know what I mean. You know your town, and where the traveller needs to go, but you may not give them every single street name or every single turn that they need to make, to get there.
Write then test, then rewrite, then retest
Giving wrong or incomplete instructions for operating a thing (machine, device or even how to get somewhere) can be dangerous for the user. I’ve been writing instructions for many years, as a teacher and in industry, but I’m always surprised at how many ways they can be misinterpreted. It’s never the fault of the student or of the user for getting it wrong; it’s my fault for not thinking it through, in the first place.
My method for preventing mistakes when creating instruction sheets is to give the thing and the instructions to someone who has never seen the thing or done the task and see if it works or doesn’t work. I usually learn more when the instructions don’t work. Then, I rewrite and simplify them as much as possible and I send the instructions out again, to different person.
One of the toughest sets of instructions I had to create, was several years ago, for how to make a specialized lifting sling. These are large, strong fabric straps which are made on an industrial sewing machine. They come in all sizes and are attached to a crane for lifting anything, from a machine to a ship, depending on the size and construction of the sling. The assembly instructions are intended for use by certified sewing technicians who know all the proper sling fabricating methods.
My writing process was to follow one technician, step by step as she built the sling and make notes and take photos. I then turned those into several pages of instructions with pictures. My plan was to send this to another sewing technician in a different province and ask that person to make the sling following the new instructions. Once done, the sling would come back to me and I would give it to a testing technician who would put it in a large test bed machine that applies many tonnes of force to it, breaking break it, to confirm its ultimate strength.
The problem was that the steps in the sewing process were so complicated that I couldn’t put it into words. The only way that I found that worked for making these instructions was to create several short videos to go along with text, to show the critical steps of the sling fabricating process. Sometimes you need to show, not tell how to do something (which is also true for storytelling by the way).
Bad operating instructions; a real world example
Since I was a kid, I’ve been interested in airplanes and flying (I earned my license in the 1980s).
One instruction that read from World War Two was for fighter pilots who where being chased and in trouble. The rule for escaping and surviving was for the pilot to move all controls fully forward and to the left. You would never do this in a regular aircraft since it would overstress the engine and overspeed the airplane, but military aircraft are stronger, and if someone is on your tail it’s better to risk losing your wings than getting shot.
This is an example of a nice simple instruction; everything forward and to the left. An example of a bad operating instruction is one where the product designer may or may not know a detail but doesn’t tell you, whether by error or by intent.
This happened a few years ago when Boeing stretched their model 737 and made some adjustments to the airplane’s computer to compensate for the change in weight and balance. The new version was called the 737 MAX. The problem with this was that since the manufacturer considered this to be a minor upgrade and the new airplane looked like any other model 737, there were few new operating instructions for pilots to know, for flying the new version. The result was two crashes because the pilots didn’t know the instructions for disabling a new feature, in a certain flight situation. The 737 is the best selling and most reliable jet in the world and the problem has been fixed including more pilot training, so I would not hesitate to fly in one. To make the airplane even safer, Boeing also added new safety features so the pilots can now easily override the computer if needed.
This is an extreme example and if you don’t read the instructions for your new microwave oven, it probably won’t hurt you. However, if the product is a new car with driver lane assist features or similar things, you might want to read the whole owners’ manual, even if it’s only to know how to disable a feature if necessary.
Nice and simple instructions
Sometimes all you need are a few simple words or even better, a few pictograms. Think of the safety card of every airplane in which you’ve flown. The things that I focus on are first, where are the exits? and second, how do I open the emergency door (do I lift and push, or lower and pull)?
I recently designed a new safety feature for a large printing press. These things are the size of three railway locomotives, placed one behind the other. We needed a small platform and ladder for an operator to climb to its upper deck for doing certain tasks. The operators were involved in the whole design process since they live and work with their machine every day. Once everything was worked out and sketched, it was sent to a professional engineer for the stamp of approval then sent to the local welding fabricator to have it built. So, do you really need instructions for how to use a ladder that is attached to a platform? Yes, you do. The ladder is really a set of steep steps with handrails, like you would find on a large sailboat or on a ship. They look like a set of stairs, but they are a ladder, so you need to be facing the steps when coming down. If you face outward you risk falling, so my instruction label on the ladder is simple “Face toward steps while descending.”
I find that the more complicated is the product, the larger is the set of instructions. Sometimes, they make no sense at all, such as with an outdoor light timer I have that has a completely useless programming sheet. In that case, I found that the simplest thing to do was to just go to YouTube and enter the product and luckily for me, someone had posted a nice short simple video on that website showing me how to make the thing work.
Maybe this method will also work for everyone who has bought flat pack furniture from a certain Swedish company. Those are one set of instructions that you should never throw away.
James Golemiec is a Canadian Registered Safety Professional with over eleven years’ experience coordinating and managing complex safety systems at manufacturing facilities and performing inspections on project job sites across Canada.