Instructions that Give Technical Writers a Bad Name

I can’t believe its been over a month since I blogged. Did you hear we had a baby? My post-frequency is a direct result of that blessed event.

I assume, at least, that you heard that we had a baby. I mean, if you are reading this entry, I assume that you are a regular reader and not one of those people who keep finding my posts talking about FTP in Internet Explorer 7. I made a couple of posts about that topic a couple of months ago, and now I’ve got a pretty high ranking in Google for the term “FTP in IE 7.” But anyway, those who find me through that topic don’t generally read my main page, or so my stats tell me. So you are the loyal few who check the main blog page to see if I’ve written, so you already know about our kiddo.

Part of having a new baby is buying a lot of stuff. And seemingly invariably when you buy stuff that isn’t clothes, you have to put it together. I had the experience of buying a baby bouncer the other day, and as I read the instructions, I thought to myself, “its junk like this that makes my whole profession look bad.”

First problem: the packaging claimed the bouncer was “one piece.” Does that mean to you that no assembly is required? After all, how does one assemble one piece? Then I dumped out the once-piece bouncer and found no fewer than 15 pieces. none of which could effectively be used as the advertised bouncer without being assembled with something else. Then when I pulled out the instructions to help me figure out how to assemble it, I read “Assembly requires parental supervision.” Are you kidding me? Bouncers are for an infant. I wouldn’t purchase this for a child old enough to assist me in assembly, so why would I assume I could just leave this in a child’s care to put together?

Not only that, but the instructions were incomplete, and in some cases, incorrect. The instructions included diagrams to assist in assembly, but the diagrams weren’t even correct for the step the instructions were describing.

In the end, we put everything back in the box and returned it to the retailer. The truth is that we just didn’t like this model of bouncer. But I kind of like to think that it is my way of rejecting incompetent instructions. 🙂