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RTFM = Read the Funny Manual?
coronaride writes: "This article over on Wired discusses the issue near and dear to every sysadmin and support tech's heart. I, myself, never read any manuals that accompany the products I buy (but when does cheese-whiz really need instructions anyways?) unless something majorly goes wrong! The article talks about how some countries, including Japan, try to spice up their product manuals in order to entice the users to read them. Is this just too much work for our lazy American manufacturers to do?"
Oh, god no! I hope they don't start doing anything like that here. The best manuals are concise and very clear. I don't want to read alot, I want to find the answer I'm looking for and absorb it in the shortest possible amount of time.
Adding jokes, dilbert cartoons, puns would, in my opinion take away from that. I have comics taped to my monitor because they are funny, I have manuals on my shelf because they give me information. Don't make me put manual pages on my monitor or comics on my shelf.
-Sean
Maybe if companies spent a little more on their manuals, and making them easier to read or more entertaining, then they wouldn't have to spend so much money on tech support.
Game manuals are often funny or entertaining. The Arcanum manual was incredibly well done, with lots of 1800's style science, fonts and pictures. I'd read that one again just for fun...
They are the "for Dummies" series of books. Well written by experts in the particular field, and a bit of humor tossed in occasionally. If OEM manuals were like this, the Dummies series would never have existed.
By far the best manuals, in my not so humble opinion, are Unix man pages. They tell you EVERYTHING you need to know without fluff. The first time I started using unix, I was given the System V Rel 3 programmers, user, and Administrators guide and reference manuals. I read them all and the rest is history. If i want to be entertained, I will read fiction. If I want info, then don't sugar coat it, just give it.
The exeption to this rule has been some of the Nutshell books that are both informative and entertaining. But if you try to add too much humor, the message gets diluted.
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable" - JFK
Anyone remember the manuals for the old Maxis games? Those were great. I seem to remember Simlife and Simcity 2000 being particularly good, and the Simearth manual was more education than I got in all four years of middle school science.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Read some good Japanese documentation to understand what I am talking about:
The first is translated into English, the second hasn't been translated yet. The first book explains Fourier, starting with basic trig.
In the US, our educational material is very poor. Pictures are either not present when they should be, or present when they shouldn't be. Marketting tastes usually move people towards glossy pictures over iconic representations that do a much better job of abstracting the message (read Chapter 2 of Understanding Comics to understand this well). Many technical people know that the images in our books are not there to help explain things, but rather, to sell books, and thus hold pictures in contempt. "Just give me the text symbols, and leave out the nonsense cute pictures. AraRararrARarr!" is a common attitude here, and it harms us, because we are not open to diagrams when they will help us.
I have seen many other examples of Japanese documentation, but I don't own them, so I can't list them here. Go to your local Japanese communities bookstore, though, and look for Linux documentation or educational materials. (They seem to think the Penguin is kawaii.) They are quite different than ours- beyond just different types of characters.