Readability/Usability/Quality 4-00 (December 2000) by Åke Rullgård

Experiences from Acquisition of a New Lawnmower

This article deals, despite the title above, with aspects on handling and checking of technical documentation. I consider these aspects as part of the functionality of documentation besides more conventional functionality such as factual correctness, layout, combination of figures and text. Here is the story.

My old lawnmower had come to an end and I bought a new one. The summer of year 2000 was, however, very rainy and while waiting for better weather so I could use the new machine, out of curiosity, I took the time to thoroughly study the supplied documentation. That was very interesting, because I was able to make some observations relevant also to documentation of other types of equipment.

My observations mainly concern the ease, or rather difficulty, in how the user handles the documentation. It is a well-known fact, and a problem, that documentation supplied with machines, apparatus, etc, is seldom studied by the user. The reason may partly be that the documentation is delivered in an inconvenient form. Technical writers should consider it as a part of their profession to advise producers of lawnmowers or any other devices on how to arrange the documentation so that it facilitates handling by user.

I will now describe my observations and suggest improvements. The documentation for my lawnmower consists of the following booklets:

1. Safety instructions
2. User´s handbook
3. Address list of service workshops
4. Separate user guide for the engine from the manufacturer, a sub-supplier
5. Guarantee clauses
6. Video cassette without speech of about ten minutes showing assembly and use of the lawnmower

In order to save space in my binder for user manuals, I wanted to extract the Swedish version of each part. This is practical not only in case of documentation for lawnmowers. Very often, though, I meet some practical obstacles:

1. All language versions are printed on sequential pages in the booklets and therefore it is not possible to extract one or a few versions without getting also a page from another language as part of the selected sheets. The booklets should be printed in such a way that only one language appears on each sheet. Then it would be possible to take out just the desired language version. It would also be possible to extract several complete versions which, according to my experience, often is necessary when compiling documentation for industrial plants. Even if this way of printing requires that some pages are left empty, the supplier should offer this possibility as a courtesy to the end user as a reward for not having delivered only the user’s particular language.
2. All booklets, except the user´s guide for the engine, are in A5 size. However, the left margin is so narrow that holes punched for filing the papers in binders extinguish part of the text. (The narrow margins are probably caused by reduction of A4-size originals to A5, to save paper.) Text damaged by punched holes can usually be restored, but when figures in a table are turned into confetti problems may arise. Consequently, technical writers should make sure that their documentation is not mutilated by poor printing and editing procedures. Failures like this usually are not unveiled until the documentation has to be used, e.g. for repair work, and then ambiguous figures may be fatal.
3. A positive experience was that all booklets carried complete bibliographical data, i.e. document id-number, revision code and date. However, this data was printed only on the first page of each booklet and hence can be lost if a particular language version is extracted. All bibliographical data should be present as a footnote on each page, and technical writers should remind the supplier about the need for such footnotes.
4. I am sorry to report that the documentation did not contain a list of contents specifying all items of a complete documentation set. Therefore, users cannot check whether they have received all documents intended for the product. The lack of a list of contents can be harmful to both end user and supplier. The end user will not be informed what the complete documentation set contains. If safety instructions are missing, the user will not be aware of it and the supplier will not be able to prove that safety instructions were supplied. In case of personal injury, heavy legal costs may be the result. Only the booklet describing the engine stated the product model for which the documentation was applicable. This information is probably omitted so the same documentation can be applied to several models. The paper describing the guarantee refers to a form to be filled out by the seller, but this form was not found anywhere in the documentation set, which indicates poor checking for completeness of the documentation by the supplier.

Of course, it can be said that future documentation will be delivered in digital form on CD and hence problems such as too narrow margins will not occur. This may be true, but for a long time documentation will continue to be delivered in paper form, particularly for consumer products like lawnmowers, video recorders, etc. And even then, documentation delivered on CD will require that each end user is informed about the specific documents valid for each particular delivery. This is especially important for documents on CD because this medium will in many cases contain documents covering all models produced by the supplier. Documentation on CD also requires a means for easy navigation through the vast amount of information stored on the CD, which corresponds to efficient and convenient organization of documentation on paper.  

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