Link This |
Email this |
Blog This |
Comments (0)
Real Men Don’t Read Manuals - Part 1
October 23, 2007
As parents, it’s important for us to teach critical life lessons to our children to help them as they join the work force. Like rolling stops, another lesson I’ve inadvertently taught my son is “real men don’t read manuals”, and the corollary “when all else fails – read the manual”.
I know what you’re thinking - either one of us or both of us are watching too many “According to Jim” TV episodes. While funny to read I don’t really agree with this all the time. In fact, I may be part of a dying breed that actually likes reading manuals for certain things.
For example I do like to read software manuals but I don’t like to read manuals for furniture assembly. Not because there is anything inherently easier about furniture assembly – it’s just that it never seems to be translated by anyone who actually understands the language.
But I usually regret not reading the furniture manual because I always put something together either backwards or upside down. That may be the motivation for wanting to read software manuals. Because unlike furniture, which is easy to take apart and put back together, any preflight person will tell you it’s usually harder to repair a bad file than create one from scratch.
So imagine my surprise as I prepare to teach a preflight and repair course about PDFs and I can’t find the manual on the latest version, Acrobat 8. I kept searching the 3 DVDs that came with the Creative Suite 3 and kept finding the same things: one installation disk, one disk with other support documents (full PDF manuals for InDesign, Illustrator) and another disk with video clips.
I admit that the CS3 disks have video clips that are good. It’s nice to see a product manager or trainer go through an exercise such as the preflight exercise. But for me some of these new training methods such as video clips or webinars are either too simple in their content or go too fast over complex subjects; they require watching or listening over and over again – which is frustrating.
Maybe it’s because people of my generation learned through what may today be considered an old-fashioned medium known as reading, but I struggle to get as much out of the video clips and webinars as I would from a manual.
This was a shock to me and I started wondering if the software industry has expanded upon the “real men don’t read manuals” idea, and are saying, “real companies don’t create manuals”.
(to be continued)
Posted by Howie Fenton on October 23, 2007 | Comments (0)
