How Companies Make Their Products Useless (And How to Avoid It) [Good Design #3]

Sometime when you need a good laugh, do a Google search for “worst instructions ever” and see what turns up. Among the bounty of hilarious posts and scathing reviews (note that: it’s not just your product that’s being reviewed too!) is a common theme: unusable instructions make a product unusable.

Most of the instructions in my Google search were bad because a blind monkey translated them into something resembling English, but often the culprit is bad content design.

This is the third in a series of posts that discuss Dieter Rams’s 10 principles of good design and why good design is important for content writing. In this series we explore each of the principles and what it means for content writing and technical writing.

Today we look at the second principle of good design:

Good design makes a product useful. A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product while disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.

Make It Useful, or Don’t Make It

Technical writing and content writing have a double purpose: they’ve got to emphasize the usefulness of the product, and the content itself must be useful. It’s not enough to have accurate content or even well-written content—good design is critical to usefulness.

My six-year-old’s birthday was a real pain for me this year. The in-laws gave him some Transformers^TM that were approved for ages 5+, which was probably true if that means that a kindergartener won’t to try to eat the toy or flush it down the toilet. But if it means that the kid should be able to transform it from a car to a robot, then you can just forget it. Besides the fact that the toy’s parts had to be smashed into place (bad product design), the instructions were so hideous, they were incomprehensible. Were they complete? Yes, I believe so. Were they accurate? From what I could tell, probably. But the content was so poorly designed that it made the toy useless. The toy sits, unplayed with since his birthday, in a corner of my son’s closet. Good content, without good design, is no good. Overlook content design, and you could do real harm to your product’s usability!

That’s a pretty extreme example, but I hope you get the point. The Transformer was a difficult toy to begin with, but if the content had been designed well, my son could have enjoyed a sub-par product and we would have had a much better opinion of the manufacturer. What a difference good design can make!

How Then Shall We Design?

To design good content that will enhance a product’s (and the content’s) usefulness, ask questions about what will make the content more usable. Here are a few questions to ask as you’re designing your content:

1. What format will be most usable for the customer? PDF/print? Online help? Wiki? FAQs on website? Tool tips only? Video/animation?
2. How should I structure the content so that information is easy to find?
3. Illustrations: how many? How large? Should I use photos, screenshots, illustrations, or CAD? Where should images be placed on the page? Should I use callouts? If so, what kind of style?
4. Would video add value?
5. What kind of writing style is appropriate?

Also in this series:

• The 10 Commandments for Designing Your Content
• What’s the Point of Innovation? [Good Design #2]