AboutUI

I agree with the idea of building products that are so intuitive that you will never need an installation manual but I have used so many products that won't let you install because you are not connected to the internet!! and there is no instructions for how to get around it because there is no manual – probably because someone thought that their product installation is so straightforward that their users will never need a manual.

I don't know if you have ever installed Ruby on Rails but its super easy, just type this one command into the terminal/command prompt and you are all set – downloads the package(they call it gem), checks if there are any dependencies and downloads and installs them before it installs the main rails gem, just type the command in and everything will be taken care of. All of this ease of use comes with a prerequisite – you have to be connected to the internet, look around their site to see if they have instructions for how to install rails when you are offline and you will have a tough time finding the instructions – I never could. There is no “manual” because the installation process is so simple and straight forward for “most” of the users but what about the “others”?

Similar story – Installing software on a mac is dead simple, in fact there is no installation because you just drag the app from the dmg and place it in a folder on your mac (usually the Applications folder). I did not know this when I switched to a mac, I downloaded a dmg and I did not know what to do, based on my previous windows knowledge I double clicked on it and a window opened up with just one .app file in it and nothing else. No read me file, no instructions, no manual. Its embarrassing when I think about it now, all I had to do was drag the app file and put it in the Applications folder but I just didn't know and there were no instructions that said this is what I had to, it took me a few hours of googling to figure that out. The software was Firefox 2! So I wrote a “manual” for it thinking may be there is someone out there that could use this and just as I had expected there are people who had to go though a similar experience like mine. That page on my website had over 3000 unique visitors in the past one year (Google Analytics). Starting with Firefox 3 they have made changes to the window that opens up when you double click on the dmg to make the process more intuitive but I still don't think it would hurt to include a “Readme” file with instructions or in other words a “manual”. I can imagine how this could be a challenge for Firefox because they support over 70 languages.

I am sure designing UI for enterprise software is different in some aspects but relying solely on the intuition of the user or the affordance of the UI elements is probably not a good idea and if you have the resources then I don't see a reason why you wouldn't want to create a “manual”