RE: Is there a study on reading warnings, notes?

["Leonard C. Porrello" <Leonard -dot- Porrello -at- SoleraTec -dot- com>]

My concern is that users arguably never read more than they absolutely
have to, and unless you somehow draw attention to warnings, they will be
probably be ignored. If I were working for a dishonest company (which I
am not) and I had to include something in a manual that I'd rather users
not read, I would embed it in a paragraph.

I am not sure that even "Note" in bold is a strong enough convention. To
me, "note" says, "something you might find of interest." That's not
sufficient for a warning. Instead, I use the international, triangular
symbol for "caution".

Of course, in saying all of this I assume that you want to create
documentation that is truly useful. If, on the other hand, the
documentation is just padding for the product, then embedding warnings
would be just fine.

Standardizing and single-sourcing is a wonderful. However, it should
never be done at the expense of the user.

Leonard

-----Original Message-----
From: Shannon Wade [mailto:SWade -at- daktronics -dot- com] 
Sent: Wednesday, November 05, 2008 11:11 AM
To: Leonard C. Porrello; techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Subject: RE: Is there a study on reading warnings, notes?

I'd be happy to share. We're looking to standardize as much of our
manuals as we can. I work for a company with multiple business units and
multiple tech writers for each of those business units. Our department
is currently going through "lean" for our manuals. We have determined
that if we can standardize much of our manuals into "chunks" that can be
used across multiple departments, replacement of information when
products are updated will be that much easier. The notes that we had
typically included were not formatted to be obvious to everyone. We felt
that we might as well remove the "note" designation so that the warning
was being included in the descriptive text.
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