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Subject:RE: Is there a study on reading warnings, notes? From:"Shannon Wade" <SWade -at- daktronics -dot- com> To:"Leonard C. Porrello" <Leonard -dot- Porrello -at- SoleraTec -dot- com>, <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Wed, 5 Nov 2008 13:26:37 -0600
Extremely valid points. And I do appreciate your input. It's something I will take into consideration when crafting my documentation. However, perhaps I didn't make it clear enough that we are including, at the beginning of each manual, in big bold print, and the idea of hot pink paper has been jokingly thrown around, a list of the major safety warnings. Anything else that requires their attention will be addressed by the individual business units in their own list of cautions and warnings. We are not attempting to side-step the warnings, nor are we attempting to bury them. We are actually trying to draw more attention to them than they have had in the past.
Shannon Wade
Technical Writer
tel 605.697.3219
website www.daktronics.com
-----Original Message-----
From: Leonard C. Porrello [mailto:Leonard -dot- Porrello -at- SoleraTec -dot- com]
Sent: Wednesday, November 05, 2008 1:28 PM
To: Shannon Wade; techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Subject: RE: Is there a study on reading warnings, notes?
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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