I spent a morning (and afternoon) recently setting up a new wireless router kindly bequeathed by my neighbour: a futuristic-looking box with a few flashing lights down the side and some dangerous-looking spikes coming out of the top (the router, not the neighbour).

Connecting it to the phone line was fairly easy (following the time-honoured method of plugging each cable into whichever socket would fit). Connecting a laptop to the wireless network was not.

I didn’t have the user manual as it had been lost somewhere, or possibly burnt in frustration, by its previous owner. “No problem,” I thought, “I’ll just download it from the internet”. A good 20 minutes of searching unearthed the manual for a similar model lurking in the recesses of the manufacturer’s website.

In PDF format.

I went and made a cup of coffee while my aging internet connection (broadband would have been good, but I’d need the new router working for that) downloaded 28 megabytes worth of PDF file, containing the instructions I needed along with their Russian, Spanish and Swahili translation, none of which came in particularly useful.

Searching the document drew a blank - Acrobat seemed to think the manual was an image and couldn’t recognise the text to search it - so the rest of the morning was spent scrolling through the manual, skim-reading each page for a clue.

And the router was in the other room (I don’t have Wifi yet, remember?), so I had to keep running from computer to router box to press reset or check which light was flashing. OK, I could have printed the manual out, but that’s not very green, and besides, I don’t think my printer can cope with Russian characters.

In the end, the manual didn’t have the answer anyway, so in desperation I turned to online discussion groups, a disorganised, blind-alley-laden, wondering-aimless-narative-filled information source if ever there was one.

I found the answer eventually, and the internet connection is now, finally, working fine, but I can’t resist the temptation to blog about how doQer would really have helped in this situation:

For a start, doQer will provide quicker access to the section of the manual you need, without the long download time. It puts user manuals in a variety of different formats, and you can chose to view by section. A PDF version is available, and so is a browsable HTML one. It’ll also automatically format user manuals so that they’re easy to read on a handheld device. Hopefully running between rooms will no longer be necessary.

doQer can translate user manuals into a whole variety of different languages too, so you can choose the language you need rather than sifting through lots of incomprehensible sections.

And finally, user feedback in doQer allows you to submit questions, and read feedback from others. doQer users can insert questions right into the manual itself, which are immediately forwarded to the publisher. I could have submitted a question about the user manual, or perhaps even benefited from the experience of a previous user who’d been in the same boat, without resorting to those internet forums.

Where were you when I needed you doQer? Thankfully, we’re launching soon…

Tags: doqer, technical writing, user guide, user manuals, writing

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 18th, 2009 at 3:50 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.