Since becoming a father a few months ago, I鈥檝e been nursing a grudge against something tiny, seemingly inconsequential, and often discarded: instructional manuals. Parenthood requires a lot of gadgetry to maintain a kid鈥檚 health and welfare. Those gadgets require puzzling over booklets, decoding inscrutable pictographs, and wondering whether warnings can be safely ignored or are actually disclosing a hazard.
To give an example, my daughter, typically a cooing little marsupial, quickly discovered babyhood鈥檚 superpower: Infants emerge from the womb with talon-strength fingernails. She wasn鈥檛 afraid to use them, against either her parents or herself. So we purchased a pistachio-green, hand-held mani-pedi device.
That was the easy part. The difficulty came when we consulted the manual, a palm-sized, two-page document.
The wandlike tool is topped with a whirring disc. One can apparently adjust the speed of its rotation using a sliding toggle on the wand. But the product manual offered confusing advice: 鈥淧lease do not use round center position grinding,鈥 it said. Instead, 鈥淧lease use the outer circle position to grinding.鈥 It also proclaimed, 鈥淪tay away from children.鈥 In finer print, the manual revealed the potential combination of kids and the device鈥檚 smaller parts was the reason for concern.
One would hope for more clarity about a doodad that could inadvertently cause pain.
Later, I noticed another warning: 鈥淚f you do not use this product for a long time, please remove the battery.鈥 Was it dangerous? Or simply an unclear and unhelpful yet innocuous heads-up? We didn鈥檛 know what to do with this information.
We now notice shoddy instructions everywhere.
One baby carrier insert told us to use the product for infants with 鈥渁dequate鈥 head, neck, and torso control 鈥 a vague phrase. (The manufacturer declined to comment.)
Another manual, this one online and for a car seat 鈥 a device that鈥檚 supposed to protect your kid 鈥 informed readers with words and images that a model baby was 鈥減roperly positioned鈥 relative to the top of the headrest 鈥渟tructure鈥 when more than one inch from the top. Just pixels away, the same model, slumped further down, was deemed improperly positioned: 鈥淭he headrest should not be more than 1鈥 from the top of her head,鈥 it said, in tension with its earlier instructions. Which was it, more than one inch or not? So we fiddle and hope for the best.
I acknowledge this sounds like new-parent paranoia. But we鈥檙e not entirely crazy: Manuals are important, and ones for baby products 鈥渁re notoriously difficult to write,鈥 Paul Ballard, the managing director of 3di Information Solutions, a technical writing firm, told me.
, a professor of social and behavior sciences at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, told me that for decades, for the young and middle-aged alike, unintentional injury has been the leading cause of death. That鈥檚 drownings, fires, suffocation, car crashes. The USU is a federal service academy training medical students destined for the armed services or other parts of the government.
Some of these deaths are caused by lack of effective communication 鈥 that is, the failure of instruction about how to avoid injury.
And these problems stretch from cheap devices to the most sophisticated products of research and development.
It鈥檚 a shortcoming that鈥檚 prompted several regulatory agencies charged with keeping Americans healthy, including the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, to prod companies into providing more helpful instructions.
By some lights, they鈥檝e had success. NHTSA, for example, has employees who actually read manuals. The agency says about three-quarters of car seats鈥 manuals rate four or five stars out of five, up from 38% in 2008. Then again, our car seat鈥檚 has a five-star rating. But it turns out the agency doesn鈥檛 evaluate online material.
Medical product manuals sometimes don鈥檛 fare too well either. , director of MedStar Health鈥檚 Human Factors program, told me that, for a class he teaches to nurses and doctors, he prompted students to evaluate the instructions for covid-19 tests. The results were poor. One time, instructions detailed two swabs. The kit had only one.
Technical writers I spoke with identified this kind of mistake as a symptom of cost cutting. Maybe a company creates one manual meant to cover a range of products. Maybe it puts together the manual at the last moment. Maybe it farms out the task to marketers, who don鈥檛 necessarily think about how manuals need to evolve as the products do.
For some of these cost-cutting tactics, 鈥渢he motivation for doing it can be cynical,鈥 Ballard said.
Who knows.
Some corners of the technical writing world are gloomy. People worry their jobs aren鈥檛 secure, that they鈥檙e going to be replaced by someone overseas or artificial intelligence. Indeed, multiple people I spoke with said they鈥檇 heard about generative AI experiments in this area.
Even before AI has had its effect, the job market has weighed in. According to the federal government, the number of technical writers from 2001, its recent peak, to 2023.
One solution for people like us 鈥 frustrated by inscrutable instructions 鈥 is to turn to another uncharted world: social media. YouTube, for instance, has helped us figure out a lot of the baby gadgets we have acquired. But those videos also are part of a wild West, where creators offer helpful tips on baby products then refer us to their other productions (read: ads) touting things like weight loss services. Everyone鈥檚 got to make a living, of course; but I鈥檇 rather they not make a buck off viewers鈥 postpartum anxiety.
It reminds me of an old insight that became a digital-age clich茅: Information wants to be free. Everyone forgets the second half: Information also wants to be expensive. It鈥檚 cheap to share information once produced, but producing that information is costly 鈥 and a process that can鈥檛 easily or cheaply be replaced. Someone must pay. Instruction manuals are just another example.
