How to qualify a vendor by looking at their manual

At a time when all vendors compete in being “extremely simple and very cheap” it can sometimes be a challenge to make a fast and quick comparison. I have a “simple, cheap and quick” tip to help make the initial judgement on the overall quality of a product, the company behind it and all promises that are given…..

Check out the manual!

We have all done it – bought a cheap remote control or downloaded an app, only to find a piece of really thin paper in Chinese or as an web page that obviously has been auto translated, trying to explain how to set up the device. It´s extremely annoying, takes up our time and is just plain bad.

The same goes for software products, a bad manual tells you a few things:

• The vendor really does not care about how or even if you use the product
• The vendor has limited or no own experience in using the product for the function that it is sold.
• The vendor might be a great code cruncher – but that is not what you bought – you bought a product that should in most cases save you time and/or money.

A good manual on the other hand should:

• Save time in finding operational and functional answers to your product.
• Make usage of the product easy for more in the company and by that reducing training costs.
• Reduce risk, if the application can be used by more people in the company it reduces the risk of creating “a single super user that needs to be in on everything relating to the product” – what happens when he/she gets sick or leaves the company?

A good manual tells you that the vendor cares for his/hers product, how its being used trying to maximise the usage at the customer i.e. the vendor cares for you.

And of course google, forums, blogs etc. etc. are great to compliment a good manuel, but they can not be the starting point as it takes way to long and gives way to many option to get the basic knowledge.

Needless to say… we do spend a good amount time on our manuals as we do think the above is true, take a look at our manuals

Cheers / Jan