Don’t use the lazy design excuse of RTFM

RTFM is an old acronym for “Read The F-ing Manual.” I hate it. It’s an engineer’s retort to a user not understanding his bad design.

Sure, there are plenty of advanced instruments that require a user to read a manual. But most often, the obnoxious instruction to read the manual belies the issue that the instrument at hand was poorly designed. RTFM also ignores the fact that manuals are often more complex than the products they purport to explain.

For example, no manual should have been required to set the clock on your VCR yet this persists as an example of scary technology.

I sat in a meeting with a web design client once when she asked our boss if she could update her site herself. My boss said, “you don’t want to do that. We could show you but it would be like the clock on your VCR. You’d set it once and never do it again.” He wasn’t a designer and he preferred clunky closed source software that was hard to operate. He was using an old example to scare a client into depending on him: “Technology is frightening. Let the experts handle it.”

I disagreed. I wanted to make the technology as friendly and easy to use as possible so that we at the agency could focus on the work we liked to do (build sites) and the client could be an agent in her own website’s success by personally handling the content.

37signals (now Basecamp) said it best in their book Getting Real: “You don’t need a manual to use Yahoo or Google or Amazon. So why can’t you build a product that doesn’t require a manual?”

Designing something to be simple to use is hard work. But it puts the labor on the designer or developer where it should be.

This is an excerpt from my book, good.simple.open: the values that lead to better work. Read it online, on Kindle, or in paperback.