Reading the instructions.

I saw this around the house, and when I was through laughing, I thought about training, documentation, interfaces and the various elements that take us from neophytes to functional users.

As any support person will tell you, for many of us, reading the the instructions is often postponed, which is fairly predictable. When you have a shiny, new toy, you want to play with it first, and if it’s any fun or intriguing enough, you’re not in a hurry to stop and break out the manual.

That said, I am just amazed when I think about how tech savvy many of us have become. The personal computer itself is really easier for many of us to fix than a washing machine. We routinely join specific communities to help us become smarter users in our given field of technical interest or to get support from people smarter than ourselves on the issue at hand.

But optimizing the process of becoming familiar and facile with a program seems to take an arsenal of tools.

Using my own experience, I spend a good deal of time with a particular audio program, and to my shame I have to admit that I don’t use or know how to use all of its tools even now. Its manual is over 500 pages, and I keep it by the bed for light reading, which I know pushes me towards geekery, at least according to my wife. What proficiency I have comes from a number of sources — an active community of users, company support, the manual, the program’s integrated help, and my own trial and error.

Obviously, the first step is a great interface, (Somehow I always wander back to Creating Passionate Users for this topic)and since I’m not a geek but merely a user with some undeveloped geek tendencies, the consumer example I’d give for a great interface is Mac’s garageband, maybe even the earlier version of imovie. When I first looked at Garageband, I thought it was lightweight because I was so trained to expect a million options and window sets and preferences. Fortunately, after spending an hour with it I learned that I was utterly wrong. Simple and intuitive no longer means lightweight and less powerful, thankfully.

I passed on the visual evidence of instruction failure to Heather Beaudoin, Education and Support Manager at Ad Giants because I thought it might make an intersting post.

Her response, as one might expect, was an easy-to-grasp analogy: golf:

Putting – easiest method of getting the job done – application usability (when possible, make it so users don’t even know they’re being helped – includes inline help text and process-oriented landmarks so they know the next step to take).
Chipping – slightly more involved method for success – provide easily accessible, self-serve information in the form of help FAQs and training demos (if they need help, they’d prefer to help themselves quickly and get on with it).
Pitching – requires more effort – when all else fails, give users an easily accessible and responsive Customer Support experience to get them through their issue and on the putting green as quickly as possible.

And then she promised we could come up with another analogy, but you get her point. It takes an arsenal of tools and approaches to reach users when and where they need help. The protective cover for the iron didn’t exactly meet the “where” requirements. Who irons while facing the bottom of the appliance?