Subscribe to the Journals It’s funny when those little everyday experiences make you think about your job in a little different light.
I took the week off for the Thanksgiving holiday. My wife and I were doing some much-needed shopping in a mall at the beginning of the week and stopped at the food court for lunch. When I tried to open a ketchup packet by tearing off the corner, I made a small mess (didn’t get any on my clothes, fortunately).
Giving me a bit of a ribbing because of my profession, my wife said, “You didn’t follow the instructions!” and pointed to where the opposite corner had the dotted line and the words “Open here.”
“I didn’t see the instructions,” I replied.
This made me ask myself when I thought about it later: Do people see the instructions? The question came back today when I saw a feedback email from a user asking where the instructions were for setting up a printer to work properly with check printing. He gave no indication whether he looked in the help for those instructions.
I emailed back an explanation of where to find those instructions, and I asked where he looked for them. I added that I wanted to know so I could see whether I needed to make them easier to find. If he didn’t look in the help system at all, then there’s a different problem than whether the instructions are difficult to find. I didn’t get an answer before the end of the work day.
These things reinforce the fact that the instructions can be there (and they were, in this case) and extremely useful, but if the user can’t find them, they’re not worth a whole lot.
Related entries (auto-generated):
Usability and Maintainability: Instructions They Can Follow
A Good Example of Simplified Technical Instructions
Giving the Instructions a Fair Shot
Ben Reply:
December 2nd, 2009 at 6:55 pm
Not yet. But I received a nice email from a user today thanking me for a helpful response to a problem he reported. I think I emailed him a couple of days ago, so maybe I’ll hear from this other person by the end of the week.
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