”Figure out What to Do”, Says the Manual

I just spend some hours building a new living room PC for the home. I based on common components like a Fractal Design Node 202 chassis and an MSI Z270i motherboard for my Intel Core i7-7700 processor.  Trying to figure out how to put it together was a bit interesting though – especially if I had tried to do so without the help of the Internet.  The manuals that came with some of the components were just completely useless, essentially boiling down to “please figure out what to do”.

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Does Documentation Matter for a Product?

How important is the documentation (manual, user guide, instruction booklet) for the actual quality and perceived quality of a product? Does it materially affect the user?  I was recently confronted by this question is a very direct way.  It turned out that the manual for our new car was not quite what you would expect…

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This is just the first page, and as you can see if you know Swedish or German or both, it is a strange interleaving of sentences in the two languages.

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