Why Instructions Do Matter

robertwnielsen said:

I showed her the manual, and said, "Wonderful thing called an instruction manual. Sometimes, it pays to read it." :) She didn't speak to me for three days, until I apologized for being sarcastic. (Which I kinda was.) But, it proved my point.

I thought that's the way it's suppose to be? > When all else fails, read the instruction>

To the OP. Great thread and well needed.

Did you ever get the camera working? Was it a wireless one or not? Any which way, when the driver is installed it should lead the way to work. Sloppily-written drivers are a lot of our problems these days.

[QUOTE=HippsieGypsie;375001]I thought that's the way it's suppose to be? > When all else fails, read the instruction>

Very true, HippsieGypsie. I had the impression (and my memory may be a little bit faulty here--this incident was almost thirty years ago, in 1988) that the other two, since they had spent more time on the annual staff, felt like they didn't need to read the instructions. But, maybe they forgot how to do whatever it was they were trying to do, I don't remember exactly.

robertwnielsen said:

Very true, HippsieGypsie. I had the impression (and my memory may be a little bit faulty here--this incident was almost thirty years ago, in 1988) that the other two, since they had spent more time on the annual staff, felt like they didn't need to read the instructions. But, maybe they forgot how to do whatever it was they were trying to do, I don't remember exactly.

I don't know about you, but that would've boosted my fragile, young male ego to correct staff members, especially females.

HippsieGypsie said:

I don't know about you, but that would've boosted my fragile, young male ego to correct staff members, especially females.

OH, it did, trust me! :)

[QUOTE=Antilope;374942]It really reflects on the manufacturer as to their hardware, also. If they are so sloppy as to put out "garbage" instructions, how much effort did they put into the hardware, firmware, programming, etc?

Excellent point. As for some users not reading manuals, perhaps that explains why. I bought a surveillance camera three years ago and have spent much of those three years (on and off, of course--out of repeated bouts of frustration) trying to decipher the manual, thus to get it to work. (The box says it should have taken "five minutes"!) Full of dead ends leading to a host of unexplained error messages. (A bad joke, the thing's now obsolete.)

Much of the problem, I believe, is that the people who draft the manuals to start with (never mind any editing and translations) naturally understand the product too well and so, think that because they understand it, so everybody else should. (I didn't use the word "narcissistic" for nothing.) It's called "living inside their head." We don't.

I wonder, if manufacturers ever consider that if they put the work into producing decent manuals/user guides first, they might not need so much support staff. (Not that I would want them to do that, things being what they are, but in pure terms of cause and effect that sounds like a logical expectation.)

Please, manufacturers: test your manuals on focus groups first and stop shooting yourselves in the foot.

robertwnielsen said:

OH, it did, trust me! :)

Glad you joined. We need more members with a good sense of humor. :)

HippsieGypsie said:

Glad you joined. We need more members with a good sense of humor. :)

Thanks--heck, I think you need a good sense of humor to survive life, especially in this day & age!

alphanumeric said:

IMHO, some of it is lost in translation. The manufacturer may be based in Japan, Korea, etc. Instructions are first done in their native language, then translated to English. Sometimes not a very good translation at all. Some of the stuff I got from ASUS tech support was laughable, only in reality it actually made me want to cry.

I agree that Asus support is the worse. Wish I would have know that before I bought an Asus PC. Most times Asus support just sends a bunch of unrelated "English" words.
But in general, I agree about instructions. Not just for hardware and software, but almost everything.

robertwnielsen said:

Thanks--heck, I think you need a good sense of humor to survive life, especially in this day & age!

You got that correct! What an upside down world it's gotten to be. Bad means good now. Not that that's not too bad.

Yep, point number two is critical or all the other points are pretty much moot. Here's a gem from the manual that came with my Yiynova graphics tablet (a very capable tablet, but being that it originates in China, the manual needs some help): “Pay attention that at the ‘button’ window in there you will see the ‘monitor mapping’ block, which shown ‘monitor 1’ only while the monitor setting at mirror mode.” Yeah. Couldn't be more clear.