When Do You Read the Instructions?

An anonymous reader asks: "I originally submitted this as a poll, but the answers I'm guessing, were way too long. However, I would like to ask the crowd at Slashdot: When do you read the instructions?"

"So when do you reach for that instruction booklet? Do you:

• ...research on the internet, in magazines and also pestering friends who own one, so you're an expert before buying said item?
  
  
• ...carefully read the box and all of the instructions even before unwrapping the protective plastic?
  
  
• ...study the instructions and the quickstart guide?
• ...refer to the instructions and study the quickstart guide?
  
  
• ...lose the instructions when throwing the packaging away, but study the quickstart guide hoping for the best?
  
  
• ...look at quickstart guide when it's not obvious how to turn it on?
  
  
• ...frantically search the instruction book after letting the 'magic smoke' out of your appliance hoping you'll find somewhere saying it's suppose to do that?
  
  
• ...after it's been smashed to pieces with a hammer?"

Re:Importance...

[thegrassyknowl]

Do embedded help options (ls --help) count as reading the instructions?

Instructions should not be required.

[Anonymous Coward]

If the user interface is well thought out and cleanly designed, no instructions should be needed to use the device (software or hardware) correctly.

If you require instructions, the device is too complicated and is badly designed.

The obvious exception is where the equipment is dangerous / mission critical / requires complicated user interaction. For example, cars have a pretty simple interface (at the minimum: a wheel and two pedals), but you need to know the rules of the road to use these machines safely.

Difference between boys and girls

[harikiri]

I remember reading somewhere that the reason boys and girls differ in their computer expertise (on average) is due to the following:

• Boy jumps onto the computer, plays with it till he breaks some part of it, and is forced to figure out how to fix it.
• Girl, terrified of breaking the computer, demands to be shown what to do before using it.

Note: Yes this is a broad generalisation, but this is slashdot.

Because the guys jump into using it so quickly, they learn faster through trial and error. The pace of learning with girls is a lot slower due to their desire to know how stuff works first.

This has parallels with "reading instructions". From the large sample of friends that I have, very few of them (male) ever choose to read the instructions.

Personally, I'm affronted that I even need to read the instructions (especially for consumer electronic items). In this day and age, electronic items (VCR/DVD/camcorder/digicam) should be usable by anyone who spends 60 seconds playing with it (think iPod). In short, we should not ever need to read instructions.

Depends on the thing...

[Howie]

If I'm looking for something for a very specific purpose, and there's a particular feature I want ot be really sure is going to work how I want, then I won't buy without being able to download the manual beforehand. I recently bought a Pioneer AV amp, and wanted to be clear on whether it *really* had 3 digital ins, or 1 and 1 you could switch from optical to electrical, for example.

Other things only get the manuals read when I'm either really bored or really stuck. I've never read the manual for my original ipod (it was a mac-only CD, and I didn't have a mac, from memory, so I couldn't even if I wanted to).

It's worth pointing out that I do suffer from a case of 'I wish I'd known it could do that' every few months as a result.

My VW Golf has a wierd hidden feature that I don't think you'd ever be able to find without reading the manual - you can change the period of the intermittent wipe, but there's not explicit control for it. You turn it on, wait, then off, then back on again. The length of the wait becomes the delay between wipes. It's kind of clever when you know about it, but it's pretty poor UI that you would never guess it. Then again, the Mercedes-style wall-o-buttons isn't so great either.

Re:Not for common tasks

[david duncan scott]

In the case of the Beetle, aside from the common response that "They put the engine in the wrong place, so what'd you expect?", my theory is that there was a copper shortage at some point that made VW engineers allergic to wiring. How else can you explain the windshield washer, which was a tank hooked up to the over-inflated spare tire with a regulator valve preventing you from flattening the spare on dusty roads? It was elegant, in a way, but bizarre.

Then again, for years the gas cap was in the trunk...

two reasons why I do it

[bagofcrap]

When stuff is broken, attitude being why should I spend my time figuring something out, if its written, in big red letters, "Don't press the big red button."

The other reason is for non-consumer level gear. A Linksys router I would fully expect to be plug and play. A high-end Cisco router? perhaps not.
A 3rd party microcontroller dev-kit? I had to look up the datasheet for the power regulator they used to find out what kind of power it wanted. At which point there aren't as many manuals written at which point its not really an answer.

take that, /.!

Re:I never

[yuri benjamin]

Yes, but if you have no money, ie m=0, then no matter how confident you are, e will still be zero:

e = mc^2
e = 0 x c^2
e = 0

My 1/50th $

[Fubar420]

Figured I'd share this one, since it's relevant to the topic at hand.

I just bought myself a new digital camcorder, all the bells and whistles, natch. So I record a few friends and I outing to buy an XMas tree, and a few other things. So often, especially with complex equipment, how to do something is not always immediately clear;

Want to turn on night-mode or light assist? Oh, you need to switch the camera to program mode, go into the menu and select the moon icon.

Want to take still pictures? Move the dongle to the top, and press the record button. Cant do that? Oh yeah, we ship you a card full of sample images so you have to erase it first.

You want to erase it? Just flip the dongle back to the bottom, choose picture review, and then format card.

Now, its time to transfer the video off. Well, the camera has USB2.0 and FireWire (dv) output, but only includes the USB cable. Well, no matter, my mac's in the shop anyhow. So I plug in the USB cable to a windows box I found collecting dust, since I couldnt find USB drivers for the camera in linux.

So when I plug the camera in, windows just stares at me. I read through the quick start manual, and it says flip to "picture" mode instead of "movie" mode. Seems odd to me, but whatever.

So I flip it, and the software comes up, and says pick some pictures to download. Sure enough, lots of sample images, but no mention of getting my movie off.

So I go back to the manual.

And then, several hours of reading it later (could they have cut the esperanto section and included an index PLEASE???) I find a small one line comment hidden at the bottom of the page that discusses hooking my camera up to ANOTHER CAMERA.

That note?

"You will need to purchase a seperate DV cable to transfer video from the camera"

So yeah, I play first, and then read the manual, and then post on slashdot how shitty the manuals are :-)

Re:Difference between boys and girls

[nine-times]

I'm not sure about the boy/girl distinction, but it does seem to me that the trial&error break-it/fix-it cycle does seem to be a better way of learning about computers. Probably all sorts of other things, too, but I'm quite sure book-learning isn't the best way to learn to operate or repair computers.

First, because computers are so much about convention that they'll never make sense unless you just jump in and start using it. Second, because books so often tell you how a computer should work, but rarely give you much information about how it is working when it isn't working properly.

That's been my experience, anyway.

The big distinction is, I will check documentation for specific information. Like, back when there was no such thing as a jumperless motherboard, you'd check the motherboard documentation for the correct jumper configuration for the processor you're using. Beyond that sort of info, I usually figure it out myself or go for online forums.