Model user manual

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.

Again, for most product groups there are paid templates available which might make the work easier. These templates contain all legal texts, mandatory disposal information, copyright statements and comply with the IEC standard on user instructions.

When using the template for crafting the safety messages, I asked Philip to indicate whether a safety message is a supplemental directive, or should be placed as a grouped, section or embedded safety message. A user manual should give assistance to people by providing information about how to use a product. The crafting of meaningful headings is one of the tools that aid users in finding information. Philip has now created the draft version of his user manual, using the user manual template.

We call this version the textual content design. As Philip has a business partner and a developer with in-depth technical product knowledge, I asked Philip to let them review the work so far. Both his business partner and the developer provided feedback. Philip used this feedback to optimize the user manual. Action: Send the draft version of the user manual to anyone within your team who might be able to deliver feedback.

Ask them to combine all feedback into one document before sending it back to you. This stimulates discussion of your team members and prevents disagreement at a later stage. Once the user manual has been reviewed and optimized, the texts are more or less definite. This means that any images can now be created and added to the content. The reason to wait until the texts are ready is that creating or editing images can be time-consuming.

As images should support, replace, or augment text, you want to wait to create them until the texts are final. Images in user manuals may include illustrations, photos, screenshots, tables, diagrams and schematics. I advised Philip not to use photos as a cheap alternative for illustrations.

Often, photos are not as informative because they contain too much information. Besides that, photos can make a user manual look messy. Before we start making it look nice and translate the content, we want to be sure that the content is complete.

You can adjust the User Manual Template in MS Word by adding a company logo and adjust the font, colours et cetera, but that might have limitations. When you know how to work with Adobe Indesign, or are willing to learn to work with it, this will offer you much greater design possibilities. Action: Adjust the User Manual Template to fit your brand identity, or download the InDesign user manual template and adjust it.

Philip now has both the content of his user manual Word file and the user manual template InDesign file. The content needs to be put into the InDesign template. This is called Desktop Publishing. Action: place the content from your Word file into the Indesign template. If you decided not to use the InDesign template but stuck to the Word file, then you can skip this step. Depending on the market in which you are going to sell your product, you might need to translate the user manual. In general, a user manual should be available in a format that is easily accessible to the user.

That can be printed, or used online or on-device. In the European Union, for some product groups, it is still restricted to provide the user manual printed with the product. However, as of April , the instructions of many product groups may be delivered in a different format rather than in print.

There is one exception, however. Safety information shall still be delivered in paper form along with the product. Besides that, upon request from a consumer, a paper user manual should be made available to the consumer. The best part of all this is that you can get the same results as Philip did by following this step-by-step process on how to create a user manual.

And he did this without any knowledge of technical writing. The results are as follows: A manual that enables 1st run of product to ship on time with no delays and passing customs without any problems. I have listed this information below.

What is the definition of a user manual? Other names, or other forms of a user manual, might be: User guide Technical documentation Instruction manual Operational manual Training manual Quick Start Guide Installation manual Maintenance manual Software manual Besides the primary goal of a user manual to assist a user , secondary goals could be creating a better user experience and meeting legal requirements.

What information should be in a user manual? Based on the first template for Philip, we have developed templates for the following product groups: Medical Devices Toys Machinery Electronics What formats does a user manual have? Through the following links you can download a user manual sample for documentation: IKEA installation instructions Jura user manual Step 2 Identify the User s of Your User Manual Template Ok, so now Philip has some basic knowledge about user manuals.

Is the product used professionally or mainly privately? What other technical experiences do they have? What describes the user?

I have created a template that contains the questions. I asked Philip to fill out the template. Why use UserManuals. Our large collection of product offer the manuals of thousands brands. You can view all these document for free. They wrote about us. What our clients say? All the information are easy to find in a few seconds.

John Stone Liverpool Unfortunately I loose the original paper user manual of my office printer, but the manual from UserManuals. Subscribe to UserManuals. While most people's first instinct is to go straight to a search engine, it isn't the best choice.

Instead, it's best to begin your manual search with some groundwork. Try to get this information before you start your search:. Now imagine if you had to contact customer support with only the device on hand. You need to be able to quickly identify the device to get the information you need.

Thankfully, you can find these same identifiers and make it much easier to find your manual for free online. Most electronic products keep this information hidden from plain view. However, it is available in case you need to easily access it. To avoid any potential mistakes, try taking a photo of any product information you find. This crucial information is in inconspicuous places such as the backside, underside, or inside of an item.

For smaller items, turning the product to its backside usually reveals what you need. If you're working with larger items, consider which place to check is the fastest. Most manufacturers don't expect you to pull out a washer, dryer, or refrigerator on the fly to find its identifying information.

So check the inside door as your first stop. For some items, checking individual components can help too by allowing you to trace parts. If you've ever tried to identity an item by brand name and images alone, you know what a pain it can be. So gather the information in advance and save yourself a headache.

Once you've found out the name and model number, there are several places to look for free manuals online. In all cases, make sure to carefully enter any information you have. All of these are great resources, but a small character or number typo can ruin your results.

While Google may have been your first instinct, you'll find much more success with both a name and model number. If you enter both correctly, you'll usually get official results. However, you can sometimes run into third-party sites that don't let you access or download the manual easily.

To solve this, try filtering your search results by using site:[manufacturer's website] [device name] instructional manual.