I need manual stimulation (although a user guide will do)
Why doesn’t software come with instructions any more?
Another day, another app, another incomprehensible user interface. If this was a proper piece of software running on a proper computer rather than a £1,000 phone, phablet or some other pharcical phucking phanboi phondleslab, it might be possible to call up a Help menu or leaf through a manual.
Instead, I’m a ball of confusion staring at a bizarre arrangement of on-screen buttons labelled with arcane symbols that give no indication whatsoever of their function. Not only is it impossible to determine how to use this product, it isn’t altogether clear what the product is supposed to do.
Perhaps it’s a sign of age but I’m not so sure. About a decade ago I believed I have reached a stage in my life at which I could no longer concoct new passwords. I felt utterly passworded out. In those days, a lot of services were still using call centres for customer registrations and when the pleasant fellow taking my call would ask me to think up a password, I’d say “Um… er… no, I don’t think I can” and then we’d both sit in silence, daring each other to crack first.
Back then, I even had a bank account that you could still operate by phoning a call centre. “For security,” they’d begin, “can you give me letters three and six of your password?” My answer would be “Nope, sorry, no idea.” So they’d say it was no problem, they could set me up with a new password – could I think of one, please? “Um… er… no, I don’t think I can.”
That didn’t bode well for an IT journalist. At the time, I contemplated switching careers to something that put less emphasis on my ability to recall letters and numbers. Something less stressful and more secure. I toyed with the idea of relocating to one of those perpetually angry developing countries and open a shop up selling flammable US flags. Job for life, that.
Anyway, I’m well over that hurdle. These days, nothing stands in my way – at least nothing that a little bit of encrypted, multi-platform, open software, personal cloud-based KeePass action can’t handle. At least I’m not daft enough to give all my passwords to a third-party password manager and bite my fingernails waiting for one of their employees to accidentally cc them to the whole world in a plain text spreadsheet.
So I don’t think it’s an age thing after all. This enduring trend for software developers not to provide users with even the most basic of instructions on how to use their software isn’t just a challenge for me. Everybody seems to complain about it.
I see it most days in my role as an IT trainer. From the learner’s point of view, it helps if you have an idea of what you are going to achieve in the next few minutes and how this fits into the bigger picture. You are led through the process which – and this is important – you carry out yourself. Then you repeat it on your own.
Software developers want you to take these steps in reverse order. You are supposed to piss about clicking on things here and there on your own until by chance you stumble upon a process to actually achieve something. Eventually, you work out what you can do and, with a bit of luck, maybe even why you’d want to do it in the first place.
Back in t’old days, software came with manuals. I don’t just mean the hardbacked, ring-bound tomes that came with the likes of dBase III, which was a rare luxury that no software company or its customers could reasonably afford today. Nor am I so stuffy that I insist on the paperback doorstops that used to included in the box.
A box? When was the last time software came in a box? Gone forever and, in my case, unregretted and wilfully forgotten.
Rather – and call me foolishy demanding if you will – I just want something that tells me how to use the software. But these days, if I tap F1, the chances are that nothing will happen at all.
My pet hate is calling up the ‘Time Waste Option’ command that some idiot developer chose to label ‘Help’ but which launches a web browser and directs it to an ‘Irrelevant Off-Topic Periphery’ page that some idiot webmaster has titled ‘Frequently Asked Questions’.
Apparently, “How do I use this software?” is not a question that is frequently asked. Or ever.
The one thing you can guarantee about an online Knowledge Base is that it will always be out of date and full of notionally vague articles that describe in general terms what functions exist in the software but without explaining how to use them.
So every time you want to do anything, you have to email the support team to ask how to do it and hope they will reply with the necessary instructions. The likelihood of receiving a reply at all has diminished to such an extent that most users now head straight for the user forums so they can wail at each other instead.
I used to subscribe to one of those cloud-based personal financial accounts apps, and its help team were particularly infuriating in this respect. On one occasion, I asked them to stop copy-pasting from the Knowledge Base as it lacked the knowledge I was in need of. Instead, I insisted that they sent me step-by-step instructions – you know, like you used to get with, oh I dunno, software manuals – and these turned up in an a hastily typed email full of typos and which fizzled out at the end with a suggestion that I ask my accountant what to do next.
So I called my accountant to ask what I should do next. He told me to ditch the half-arsed software I was using because it was shite. Good suggestion. That’s the kind of advice the developers should have put in their Knowledge Base.
Clicking on a Help option in software used to take you to Help. Modern UX norms, however, determine that any request for help should be sidestepped and thrown back at the user. I suspect that actually providing the answer to a user’s question would be an admission of failure in the UX design itself, which of course is utterly impossible. So you get diverted to generic getting-started tutorials or taken to a search page that won’t accept your questions because you are not asking the ones you’re supposed to.
My other pet hate is the shit-munching video tutorial. I fail to see how spending a quarter of an hour watching a blurry rectangle of illegibility while an American spits and wheezes into a microphone that’s so muffled it might as well have been be shoved up his arse is superior to reading a step-by-step workthrough that I could complete myself in less than five minutes.
And by doing it myself in real time rather than watch someone else do it first, I will have completed both the task and the tutorial simultaneously and learnt the process more thoroughly as a result.
But most apps now have no instructions at all, other than a few annoying and badly phrased speech bubbles that appeared the first time you launched them and then never again. This is, as Shakespeare said of Richard III, a right old bugger. The self-obsessed developers who churn out this junk are clearly of the opinion that their software is so intuitive that manuals are unnecessary.
No it isn’t and yes they are.
Their websites show glossy promo vids of geeky bearded models using their apps to cure diseases, solve centuries of climate change and put an end to conflict between nations with little more than a swipe, pinch and zoom. Two minutes later, I’ve download the app for myself and I’m left staring at a black screen surrounded by designer hieroglyphs. I swipe, I pinch and, oh heavens to Betsy, I even zoom – to no avail.
None of the hieroglyphs looks like a ‘Help’ label so I check the developer’s website. No instructions. No manual. Now that I’m thinking about it, there isn’t even anything that tells me what the app actually does in any practical sense, just that it’s supposed to revolutionise something that wasn’t possible before I downloaded it. As Shakespeare noted – after penning The Tempest, I believe – “what the flying fuck am I supposed to do next?” [*]
Instructions, please.
Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, editorial training and digital publishing. He appreciates that selling the idea to software publishers of getting proper manuals written is just a cynical ploy to drum up more work for himself. He likes writing tech documentation. Yes, really.
Showing my age but I had a BBC Micro which came not only with a massive manual but even had a fold out circuit diagram in the back of it. My first PC ran MSDOS 4 and despite being only 2 3.5" floppy discs had a manual the size of the phone book with it detailing every command and parameter you could think of.
As a software designer/developer/publisher myself I am 100% with you on this one. No questions asked!
However, if you ask the yoof, they will tell you 'If it ain't a YT video, it don't exist'
Even this very day, nay not 2 hours ago, a young gentleman informed me that his dream job was to be a software developer but he was not, ever, going to read anything like documentation.