RE: Car-seat Instructions Too Difficult, Says Study

["Rob Partridge" <rob -at- holly -dot- com -dot- au>]

Speaking from experience of fitting a car seat for my little baby boy, and
later trying to find out some adjustment info on the seat, the instructions
that came with our, otherwise excellent, seat are awful. 10 pages of dense
technical descriptions in small fonts with a few incompletely labelled, and
often incomprehensible, diagrams don't make the task any easier. I come from
an engineering background and finally managed to make sense of the
instructions. I'm horrified to think how people without a technical
background cope.

And I will argue for completeness in manual design. Not only must the
content be accurate and written for the appropriate audience, but the design
could have been improved so that it wasn't such an assault on the senses.
I'm not usually for font fondling, but in this case it was definitely
needed.

Rob

-----Original Message-----
jsokohl -at- mac -dot- com wrote

Article:
http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2003/03/03/car_seat_study/index.html

Comments? Seems to me this is a technical communicator issue.
joe



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