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

[Deborah Hemstreet <deborah -dot- hemstreet -at- gmail -dot- com>]

Hi Shannon,

I can understand the reasoning. I think that how you handle this is 
going to depend on the types of warnings. For serious safety issues, I 
would go for maximum redundancy and have them a minimum of twice - once 
in the special section, and once in the associated instructions where 
the problem could actually occur. I don't know if there have been 
studies done on this, but based on the reading behavior I have observed, 
people just do not want to read... so if you have it all in that 
chapter, the readers will be happy until they get to instructions and 
have an accident... they will say "you didn't tell me", you will say, 
"why didn't you read the first chapter," and their lawyer will say, "how 
hard would it have been to put it in with the instructions as well."

The judge? Given the American court system, I believe the judge would 
find for the plaintiff....

Just some thoughts for consideration as you approach the redo.

Deborah

Shannon Wade wrote:
> 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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