If you use semantic styles, your user manuals are well prepared in case you want to shift to structured authoring someday. You can achieve this by beginning the names of related styles with the same prefix. Use the same scheme for all paragraph styles and another scheme for all character styles. Instead, use appropriate paragraph settings. If you later add or delete some lines from your user manual, everything will move to a wrong position.
Instead, always use proper manual page breaks. Even better, when possible completely automate page breaks. All sorts of empty paragraphs seriously interfere with automatic page breaks. Instead, always configure proper indentation settings as part of the paragraph properties. If you use space characters for indenting text, as soon as you change anything, all subsequent lines also need manual editing. The only place where using space characters for formatting text within a user manual makes sense, is when quoting programming source code.
When you copy and paste source code into a user manual, the source code is usually already indented with the help of space characters or tabs. Problems with tabs Avoid using the tab key. Tabs then need to be converted into tables, space characters, or indents. This rarely works well. Instead of using tabs, set up some proper paragraph indentation, or use a borderless table.
Always only use the paragraph styles and character styles that have been defined in your user manual template. If you overwrite a paragraph style for an individual paragraph or if you overwrite a character style for an individual word, this will get you into trouble when you need to change the design of your user manuals.
If you have exclusively used template styles and want to change the design, all you need to do is to change the style definitions. This can result in many hours of extra work, particularly if you have multiple documents. Do you want to save lots of time and avoid potential strategic mistakes?
The Starter User Manual Template can help you. C Copyright - indoition information development Marc Achtelig Imprint and contact information Privacy policy. A topic will become a section in the user manual. It can be a chapter or a sub- paragraph. As soon as a user is looking for an answer to his problem, he will use the table of contents to find out how to navigate to that answer.
I asked Philip to structure the topics and define their place in the user manual, by assigning a certain topic to a specific chapter or sub- paragraph. You have now created the Table of Contents ToC. The ToC is the outline of your user manual. Each topic in the user manual gets its own heading. The headings are the sub- titles that precede the actual text. They appear in the ToC, so the user can navigate to the needed information.
Because the ToC entries play such an important role in helping your user find their way, and to help them skip what is NOT important, they need a bit more attention. Basically, you should try and work with three levels of headings: first-, second- and third-level headings.
The first-level heading describes what the entire chapter or section is about e. A third-level heading uses noun-phrases e. Packaging contents and Tools to be used. Meaningful Headings tab. Dependent on the market where your product is placed in or put into service, and dependent on the product group your product belongs to, specific legislation applies to your product.
These requirements also include requirements on the content of your user manual and safety instructions. In order to sell your product in a specific market, you should make sure that your user manual complies with these requirements. These two articles below will tell you how you can find out exactly which legislation applies to your product for the European and U.
Pro tip: when there is a Declaration of Conformity available already, you can find the applicable directives in there. Philip didn't need to conduct these steps, as the template he used already contained the legal content as required by the relevant directives. For his product, it means that the following information is required for the user manual for his product:.
This standard has been harmonised in the EU. Compliance with harmonised standards provides a presumption of conformity with the corresponding legislation! I have also created an IEC checklist that can be used to double check that your user manual complies with this standard.
In order to create an internationally compliant user manual, you should always make sure your manual meets the EU, US and requirements. I asked him to adjust the table of contents of the template according to his own table of contents. Without removing and mandatory elements of course Do you remember from step 4 that I asked to start the numbering of the sections with chapter 4?
Once you download the user manual template doc yourself, you will see that a few standard chapters have been added, as well as some appendices. The purpose of your product, or better: the intended use, is the heart of a user manual and forms the basis of ensuring the safe and healthy use of the product.
The way the intended use is described also determines your liability and affects the further contents of the user manual. The most legislation requires you to include a description of the intended use in the user instructions.
The international standard for user instructions, the IEC , provides the following definition for the intended use:. An exhaustive range of functions or foreseen applications defined and designed by the supplier of the product. By describing the intended use you determine the safe envelope of the product. And once you have determined the intended use, you can focus on providing only those safety and user instructions for how to use the product within the given envelope.
Additionally, to the intended use, many more standards, directives and regulations also require you to include a description of the reasonably foreseeable misuse.
For example, the reasonably foreseeable misuse of an aggressive detergent could be the use of it in a food processing environment. Paying too little attention to describing the reasonably foreseeable misuse will affect a company's liability. If the defectiveness of a product needs to be determined, all circumstances will be taken into account. That includes the reasonably foreseeable use of the product.
The description of the intended use determines which instructions are given in the rest of the manual. For example, if a cooling system is only used for cooling certain medications, then only these procedures need to be described.
When it could reasonably be foreseen that the cooling system may be used as a system to cool organs, this should be described in the instructions. By doing so, you, as the manufacturer, will limit your liability and you can focus on only describing how to use the system to cool medicines.
Figure 1. Reasonably foreseeable misuse? Even though the intended use has now been clearly defined, this does not mean that using a product is completely without any risks. To identify the hazards that come with the use of a product, you can conduct a risk analysis. A risk analysis can also be mandatory for certain product groups, such as low-voltage equipment, toys, machinery and equipment for use in explosive atmospheres. Standards, like the ISO , have been developed on how to conduct a risk analysis.
According to this method, there is the following hierarchy of risk-reducing measures:. This means that the user guide should warn of any residual risks related to the use of the product. This is done with safety warnings. A good safety warning describes the nature of a hazardous situation, the consequences of not avoiding a hazardous situation and the method s for avoiding it.
Rotating parts. Risk of serious injuries. Keep hands clear. Then you want to warn the user where a hazardous situation might be encountered. Do this. Do that. This is embedded safety messages.
General text general text general text. In the EU, depending on the kind of product, it might be allowed to provide only the safety information in printed form and the rest of the information online. Action: conduct a risk analysis and craft your safety messages using this template. Now I asked Philip to create all other content, such as the procedures, technical specs and legal information. Include a standard disclaimer inside the front cover that outlines the Terms and Conditions for using this guide.
Use this section to reference other documents related to the software. Make sure you refer to the correct release number for all software and documents that you refer to. If necessary, include a section on 'How to use this guide' as an introduction. You must include a table of contents. This is the heart of the guide. In the main body, separate the procedures also called instructions from reference materials.
This will help the user navigate their way through the guide much faster. Procedures help the user perform specific tasks. They are also known as instructions or tasks.
Examples of these may include:. When writing user guides, you can separate information by menu options and their respective consequences, for example, showing the user the results of each action. Subtasks that need to be performed can be divided into chunks. Each chunk can form a new chapter or section within the guide. When users are allowed to make decisions, use an If-Then approach to show the different result for each decision they make.
If you choose 'Yes,' the program will make Firefox your default web browser. If you choose 'No,' it will set Opera as your default browser. User turn to reference material when they need detailed information on a specific topic, for example, settings or parameters they must enter.
The glossary should cover all acronyms and industry terms used in the document. Help the user understand your material. Do not alienate them by using jargon and assuming that they know the meaning on these words. Any guide longer than 20 pages benefits from an index. An index helps users locate specific items very fast without having to search through the entire document manually. The template is written in standard user manual format so it would be easy to understand for user.
This is yet another effective user manual template for technical product. If you wish to design a use manual template for your product then you can use the format of this template. This template provides all the necessary information and guidelines about the use of product.
The template given here in example if of a handheld device and you can also download and edit this template for your specific requirement. The template given here is of a external hard drive and if you looking for some reference while making the user manual for your product then you can easily take reference from this template.
This template contains picture of product with details, which makes easy for user to understand the use and operations of the product. If you are looking for an effective user manual template to guide the user for DEMO of your product, then this template will be very useful for you.
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