I’ve wrote user instructions and setup guides for my last job to copy paste in for common issues. A ton of people struggle to follow the instructions even with screenshots and big red arrows for each step. I’ve run a few though analyzers and find targeting a 3rd grade reading level is the max you can do before you get questions about the instructions.
Best bet is screenshot for each tiny step(cropped with the big red arrows) with nothing more complicated than “click here” as text. Just assume the end user can’t or won’t read.
Same. You can’t write more than a 10 words in a sentence before you lose people.
They refuse to read anything that’s in a paragraph. each sentence as a bullet points is the best bet and don’t you dare make it a compound sentence.
A lot of my job lately is taking product user guides from the product company and dumbing them down even more for my userbase. Some of most difficult staff are the fresh out of undergrads… they are on par or worse than the 60+ year olds. If I gave them a link to microsoft.com tutorials they would freak out because there are ‘too many words’.
A decade ago 22 year olds we hired had way better comprehension skills and used to interact with me during orientation/training. Now they just stare blank faced at me and look confused like I’m overwhelming them, and they ask me why I can’t just give them a QR code and why they need a password to login to things.
I’ve wrote user instructions and setup guides for my last job to copy paste in for common issues. A ton of people struggle to follow the instructions even with screenshots and big red arrows for each step. I’ve run a few though analyzers and find targeting a 3rd grade reading level is the max you can do before you get questions about the instructions.
Best bet is screenshot for each tiny step(cropped with the big red arrows) with nothing more complicated than “click here” as text. Just assume the end user can’t or won’t read.
Same. You can’t write more than a 10 words in a sentence before you lose people.
They refuse to read anything that’s in a paragraph. each sentence as a bullet points is the best bet and don’t you dare make it a compound sentence.
A lot of my job lately is taking product user guides from the product company and dumbing them down even more for my userbase. Some of most difficult staff are the fresh out of undergrads… they are on par or worse than the 60+ year olds. If I gave them a link to microsoft.com tutorials they would freak out because there are ‘too many words’.
A decade ago 22 year olds we hired had way better comprehension skills and used to interact with me during orientation/training. Now they just stare blank faced at me and look confused like I’m overwhelming them, and they ask me why I can’t just give them a QR code and why they need a password to login to things.