Yeah but that was back when people actually read stuff. They don't seem to 
do that anymore. In the past year or so I started using several new (to 
me) quite complex products, and I didn't read the documentation to *any* 
of them. I expected them to be designed in an intuitive enough way so that 
I can learn along as I'm using them. Even when I got stuck with something, 
I went to look to the forums, youtube, tutorials, whatever before I turned 
to the written documentation coming with the product (if at all). As 
people get more ADD, stuff is either obvious for them to figure out or 
they move on.

Give me a well designed product without a manual and I'll be happy using 
it.
Give me a badly designed product and I'll find something else to do.
The manual isn't the deciding factor.

rado

On Thu, 8 Apr 2010, Randal L. Schwartz wrote:

>>>>>> "Frank" == Frank Shearar <frank.shearar at angband.za.org> writes:
>
>>> [...] UI design is documentation.
>
> Frank> Can I have that on a T-shirt, please? Because that's one awesome
> Frank> sentence.
>
> Back when I was first learning technical writing from some very smart
> people, our mantra was:
>
>  The manual *is* the product.
>
> As in, if it's not documented, it *doesn't* exist for the user.  And if
> it's a good product but badly documented, it will be *perceived* as a
> bad product.
>
> -- 
> Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095
> <merlyn at stonehenge.com> <URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/>
> Smalltalk/Perl/Unix consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc.
> See http://methodsandmessages.vox.com/ for Smalltalk and Seaside discussion
>