Almost every product out in the market today comes with a user manual when you buy it. User manuals are very useful to the customer and the manufacturer. They allow the customer to see how to maintain their purchase and it allows the manufacturer to include instructions for many problems the customer may encounter, which will allow the manufacturer to save money on extra customer service representatives.
Along with that, it allows the manufacturer to include safety warnings which will greatly reduce the number of injuries and lawsuits, saving them money in the long run. With every different company, there is potentially a different way of writing a user manual. Some will be better than others, but no matter how well written, there is bound to be something missing. This critique will regard the Acer Aspire 5600U user manual.
The criteria with which this manual will be judged with will be clarity, complexity of terminology, completeness, usefulness, and ease of use. Clarity is important, because if a user cannot easily find something they are looking for, they will end up assuming that the manual does not contain anything else that they need.Clarity can be thought of as many things, but for the sake of this critique, it will be addressing the setup of the manual. This manual does contain a table of contents which does make the manual accessible to the user. A person is able to look up the particular issue they are trying to address.
It addresses issues that are common to the everyday use of the computer. The manual begins with the setup of the computer, which is what a novice will look at to begin with. A novice can be considered as a complete beginner, who has never bought a computer before. These are the people that should be taken into consideration when writing a manual. If a person is not a novice, they are much less likely to transverse through a manual to deal with an issue.Although there are many topics covered for a novice to become familiar with the laptop, there is one subject matter not covered in the manual.
That topic is the instructions of how to install a program. If considering a novice, they will not know the proper method of doing this. When considering a novice, the complexity of the terminology used in the manual must be kept as simple as possible.Although many people in the consumer market have become accustomed to the terminology used in the computer market, there are still many people that have not had the opportunity to learn these terminologies.
That is why a manufacturer must keep that in mind when writing a user manual. Starting at the table of contents, using terminology such as peripherals or components may confuse many users. A person used to computers would understand what objects fall under these two terms but many people will not. If we follow the table of contents to the page where peripherals are covered, the manual remains very vague on their definition of peripherals.A novice would look at this definition, and automatically become utterly confused as to what a peripheral is. If considering components the manual successfully defines what possible components can be such as a hard drive or memory.
Even using these terminologies, a person can very quickly lose hope at understanding their device. Pictures could greatly decrease this loss of hope. With pictures, people can easily see what component is being discussed. The hardest thing to accomplish in a manual is the completeness of the document.The reason it is so hard to accomplish completeness is that it is very difficult to be able to include everything necessary.
This manual does include everything from the safety of the device, to the setup of the device, to the use of the device. The problem is the amount of description in the areas being covered. The area that is suffering from incompleteness is the part describing how to open the computer. It very briefly covers the process, but not enough to be accomplished. It would be better if this part was not even covered in the manual. If a novice was to be reading this manual, they should not be trying to take apart the machine due to the risk of critical components being harmed.
It is not even clear as to which screws should be removed, and which panels should be removed. Any other description is covered in good detail, but the process of taking apart the computer is lacking in instructions. Along with clearer instructions on how to take apart the computer, other activities which fall under the same category should be included. These activities include upgrading the hard drive, or increasing the amount of memory the computer has. Within these instructions, it would be very helpful to users to know how much memory the device can handle as well.
This would increase the usefulness of the manual greatly.The usefulness of this manual is at a low level. Although it is somewhat useful, it could be much more useful if it covered everything in much more depth and an increase of pictures would make it much more comprehendible. The important thing to remember when writing a manual is to keep in mind who will be reading the manual. As stated before, an advanced user will not be consulting the manual for information, whereas a novice is very likely to open the manual for guidance.
Although the manual may be lacking in the completeness, the ease of use is a bit better.There are a few improvements that can improve the ease of use of the manual. Even though there are only a few improvements, these improvements will greatly increase the ease of use. The first thing would be to include links in the table of contents which lead to the corresponding area of the manual.
Of course this will only be possible in the PDF format of the manual; an index could be included in the hard paper copy of the manual to increase ease of use. Another improvement would be the addition of a glossary for the computer terminology used throughout the manual. If a person cannot turn on the computer, how else will they be able to look up the word that is hindering their success?Creating manuals is a difficult process. It is difficult because of the fact that there are many different levels of knowledge in the consumer field.
If written to complex, the novice consumers will suffer, but if written too simple, the professionalism of the company may be hurt in the eyes of the advanced users. However, it is possible to keep both parties happy if a glossary was to be included in the manual. That way the advanced users can go along reading the manual as it is and the novice users can look up the terminology and understand the manual. Another issue is that if a topic is not going to be covered in great depth, it should not be included in the manual such as the disassembly of the computer. Also pictures would greatly increase usability of the manual as well as indexes.
Other than these improvements, the manual is still at an acceptable level of use.
