Kitchen scale from Lidl has 2 pages of “⚠ warning!… Caution! Danger to Life!”
Every #userGuide for every recent product I’ve looked at has several pages of safety notices. I’ve been conditioned to just ignore them. How can we take them seriously when a kitchen scale manual says:
“CAUTION! RISK OF INJURY! Do not place more than 5kg on the product.”
?
And about reference to “the product” without saying what the product is-- apparently all user manuals are written from a template and the technical writing monkeys can’t be bothered to even appear to have made an effort. Every single user manual now begins with these words verbatim:
“We congratulate you on the purchase of your new product. You have chosen a high quality product.”
LOL. I always buy the cheapest piece of low quality junk I can find. Yet the #manuals still always start off this way.
The core of my complaint is manuals often lack necessary information. It’s because they’ve apparently dumped some min wage worker in MS Word with a template that they are in a robotic mindset of just filling in blanks. So the information that is unique to a product is missing.
If technical writers used #LaTeX, user manuals wouldn’t be so useless.
They get away with it because no one returns a product for having a shit manual. Maybe we should. Or maybe the #rightToRepair needs to force #userManuals to improve.