30 January 2020 — 1125 mst
Smartphone setup manual writers could learn how
to write clearly by studying old Heathkit manuals
A few days ago, I acquired an iPhone that can meld with my hearing aid. If it performs as advertised, I’ll be able, for the first time in a couple of decades, to conduct a rudimentary conversation over the telephone, and perhaps find a way to communicate with the hordes of businesspeople and health care workers who disdain email and generally disrespect and denigrate people with hearing losses.
But that day remains in the future, as I’m having the Devil’s own time setting up and activating my iPhone.
I’ve worked with computers, with software and hardware, for decades. I know my way around a circuit board. And I always read the manual. I should not be gnashing my teeth and fighting down a temptation to smash my iPhone with a rock and communicate by jungle drum, but that’s what I’m doing because the setup and activation manuals are tainted by vague and ambiguous instructions that have sent me down one dead end after another.
That’s why these smartphone tech editors need to study how Heathkit’s manuals were written.
They were, of course, written back in the day when many amateur radio enthusiasts built powerful shortwave radios from kits. Heathkit supplied the parts, the radio geeks supplied the labor, and when the radio was assembled and operational, its builder had earned a tremendous amount of self-satisfaction, and had learned a lot about electronics.
The key to successfully assembling the kits was the manual, and, Electronic Design’s Lou Frenzel reported, Heathkit provided the best.
While Heathkit had competitors like Allied Knight, Lafayette, Eico, and a few other smaller companies, it essentially beat the pants off everyone else because it had a better product.
But Heathkit’s good reputation really came from offering a better assembly manual than anyone else. A poorly executed step-by-step manual is a prescription for disaster for any kit company. If the customer can’t build the kit successfully without massive telephone and mail support, it would die a quick death, and many did. Heathkit figured this out early and spent as much development time in the manual as it did engineering the product. Its primary marketing message was “We won’t let you fail,” and the company lived up to it.
As related by William F. Buckley, Jr., and others, Heathkit would recruit a couple of people who were ignorant of electronics, hand them the kit and manual, and observe the assembly process. If the manual stumped the assemblers, the observers asked why and the manuals were revised until fully ridded on incomplete, vague, and ambiguous, instructions. Heathkit electronics ignorant assemblers because electronics experts would unconsciously resolve ambiguities and vagaries in the manuals.
That lesson needs relearning by the people who write the instructions for setting up and activating smartphones. I can follow clear instructions without difficulty, but I cannot read the minds of manual writers who are oblivious to the consequences of ambiguity and amphiboly.
Meanwhile, if you see a column of steam boiling up from a residential neighborhood northwest of Kalispell, you’ll know I’m still trying activate my infernal phone.