The Manuals Problem

In the Healthcare industry I work in, we have to “validate” the product before we start selling it. In our context, the term “validate” means something more than just “to test”. Rather, it means “testing by the person who would be the actual user of the product”. Why is this so important? An example will clarify.

 

An engineer who is designing the product may use the touch interface on the screen and conclude it’s all good. But what if the nurse or doctor wears gloves in their work environment? Does the touch interface still work fine? Or maybe the terms used onscreen are obvious to engineers but make no sense to anyone else? It is to try and discover such issues that validation by a “real user” is critical.

 

But even our doctors who validate our products won’t help validate the manuals. Who wants to go over a manual and give feedback as to whether it is clear or not? This, of course, is a problem with all manuals, across product categories and across industries.

 

As Tim Harford says, we’d all love if we were given a “less mind-boggling set of instructions”. So why are manuals so useless? Because the “curse of knowledge” kicks in:

“(It refers to) the difficulty a well-informed person has in fully appreciating the depth of someone else’s ignorance.”

It’s very, very hard to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. Even more so when their background, field of expertise, age, gender or nationality (to name just a few areas) are nothing like yours.

 

The journalism industry knows this point well. Which is why they have people to re-read articles, and not just for accuracy. Yet, as all of us know all too well, even then, most articles are hard to understand. Something Harford, as a journalist himself, acknowledges:

“If (even after all these checks) the final result is confusing, I apologise. But you should have seen the first draft.”

 

The knee-jerk reaction we think as the solution is:

“They just need to hire an idiot and watch him try to figure out.”

Unfortunately, that doesn’t work. Because every idiot is different…

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more