Great Abstract Writing: Tell Your Users What To Expect
- Posted by Essays Blog in Essays Blog |
- December 22nd, 2008 |
- Comments
OVERVIEW
In your Person Documentation, you direct your Reader to perform tasks with your product. If you don’t tell your Reader what to expect when performing those tasks, you will have a baffled Reader, resulting in dissatisfaction and expensive calls to abstract activity.
EXAMPLE: REVERSE OSMOSIS H2O FILTER
I bought and installed a Reverse Osmosis H2O filter. The instructions told me to fill, and so empty (the instructions foolishly old the constituent “dump,” which would have caused the destruction of the group) the cell.
The filter had a capacity of about 100 gallons per day. Thusly I expected the initial fill (4.5 gallon cell) to accept less than one hour. After about an hour the cell was allay filling. Apprehensive, I called the abstract activity. I was told that it takes about cardinal hours for the cell to fill.
One line in the Person Documentation would have eliminated that call: “The cell initially takes 2 hours to fill.” Not knowing what to expect I, and perhaps other Users, lost the time and money to call the abstract activity line.
EXAMPLE: UPGRADING A ROUTER’S Code
I had any problems with my Cable/DSL (Internet-Ethernet) router. The internal control panel made it easy to check for and download updates to the internal code. The group told me that it would accept a few minutes to check for updates (good), but it did not tell me how long the update would accept to perform once I downloaded the file.
Not telling the Person what to expect in damage of time is a mistake. I started the update and after a few minutes of operation (was it employed?) I canceled the process. I re-started it again, and decided to act longer to accompany what happened. It took a few minutes longer, and successfully completed.
It would only accept a simple phrase much as “the code update can accept capable five minutes to complete” to reduce the Person’s anxiety.
PROGRESS INDICATORS (as displayed in a windowing environment) are often discarded. Any go beyond 100%, others are logarithmic: they move quickly in the early processing and act, ostensibly at the end, for a long time piece processing is completing. Consider making progress indicators relate to the time of operation, not number of files.
Any progress/activity indicators have nothing to do with the program they are associated with. I have old virus checkers that have abnormally complete, yet the activity indicator kept on moving. Make careful that progress/activity indicators do reflect activity of the associated program.
FILE DOWNLOADS DO IT
Telling the Person what to expect is not a new concept. If you have ever downloaded files, the download computer will often tell how long the file will accept to download, based upon your Internet connection.
EXAMPLE: YOUR PRODUCT’S INDICATORS
Piece most examples of “telling the Person what to expect” deals with the time needed to complete an activity, others can be related to the indicators and performance of the product.
I have a bantam astute battery charger that has a red light for each of the battery positions. Regrettably, the operation of these lights is impossible to believe, and thither is no description of how they activity.
Here’s what happens. When you first insert the battery, the light illuminates. A abbreviated piece later (the charging allay has many hours to go), the light goes off. Erstwhile toward the end of the charging cycle the light may go on again.
This is clearly confusing to the Person. The Person’s expectation is that when the light goes out, the charging is completed. This would result in a lot of Person frustration, as Users would attempt to consume “charged” batteries that were not charged. The developers of the battery charger should explain the operation of these displays.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Tell the Users what to expect as they consume your product. Often this information is the amount of time it will deem an operation to complete. For other products, you may have to tell the Person what the indicators mean.
Don’t leave your document Readers confused or left to figure things out on their own. Doing so will reduce your Users’ comfort with your product, and increase your abstract activity costs.