“Anyone who launches new products will immediately appreciate the power of this resource to influence design direction, target appropriate price points, and select materials with high consumer appeal. What I love most is that it facilitates open and powerful discussions across the marketing, design and business teams. It minimizes reliance on “the gut feel” of just one individual in an organization and helps create a unified vision for success.”
Who writes your manuals? Marketing? Engineering? Legal? Have you ever read your manuals? Have you ever found yourself with an instruction manual for something you just bought, puzzling over it? Have you ever consulted the manual because something seemed not quite right only to find that the manual didn’t address that problem?
A key part of your brand promise should be providing a clear, concise, well-written instruction manual with every product. It doesn’t matter whether that manual is printed and shipped with the product or if it is available online. Either way, the instructions are part of the product and a reflection on how much your company cares about its products AND its customers.
Design Research believes that every product instruction manual should have these qualities:
- Available in the box
- Available online (scan code on box or product to access)
- Updated regularly online to reflect product updates
- Specific to a single product, not a group of products that may or may not have some features
- Written in clear, concise language
- All languages should be tested for accuracy by knowledgeable sources
- Illustrations and photos should be generous, clear and clearly labeled
- Use your brand voice! Feel free to make it entertaining and fun!
Design Research offers a very low cost Product Manual Evaluation Service. $100/hour with a 2 hour minimum. This service is conducted by Design Research’s senior associates. (Note that this is not a recipe testing service. We will test a sample recipe in order to evaluate how the instructions explain the use of the product, but we do not test recipes for quality of recipe in THIS service. However we do have a partner that does specialize in this so let us know if you have a need for either recipe testing OR recipe creation!). To assure your success and to make your customers happy be sure to utilize our Product Manual Evaluation Service.
WE ALSO OFFER CONSUMER TESTING OF YOUR MANUAL IN OUR IN-HOME PRODUCT REVIEW SERVICE!