Problem is, people never read their manuals.
,, and this was explained once by someone I saw in a lecture many years ago.
The education system teaches us to read literature. What do you do when you pick up a book? You turn to page one and begin reading and read every page in turn until you reach the end of the book (whether a fiction or non-fiction)
This does nothing to teach a person what to do with a technical publication such as a manual. If you turn to page one and start reading you will soon become very bored after reading "Thank you for purchasing your new HD television receiver.............." You may not get any useful information until several pages in and if there is a specific piece of info you want you may have to slog through dozens of pages first.
What is not taught is how to use a table of contents or an index and worse, many manuals contain neither, or such sketchy ones as to make them a study in how to frustrate a customer. Call for help? Yeah you can do that and hope that the accent of the person on the other end is not so thick as to compound the frustration. Call centers also often employ a system in which the operator is simply typing your problem into a data search engine and telling you what it tells him. He(she) need not actually understand the device.
Some of this applies to professional products as well but a technical person will understand how to use a manual. In professional products one runs into other problems;
1) the manual was written by an engieer who understands the device implicitly and writes the manual such that one must also already understand the device to understand the manual
or
2) the manual was tossed off and printed with typos and/or references to beta versions of the device. I have a Larcan transmitter with a manual that contains schematics that barely resemble the pcb they supposedly refer to. I called Larcan once and asked where the PIN diodes on a card are located.
"Oh those aren't used in the production model, just ignore them." was the response. I replied by asking that when they finsih writing up the final revision of the manual that they send me one. (holding the sarcastic tone in abeyance to see what the response would be) I was told that they would not be doing another version, which was as I expected.
(rant mode off)
