Are you shooting yourself in the foot with bullets?
Ever click on a radio button, only to get a popup window or – worse – a crazily whirring C: drive and a sluggish progress bar? Annoying isn’t it? More importantly, you quickly learn to distrust the GUI.
Bullets in documentation are a bit like that.
The format of instructional text, like the design of a GUI control, can either succeed or fail to suggest its function. In other words, just like software, documentation can have good or bad affordances.
Bullets look like a non-ordered list…
Prerequisites
- Full protective clothing, including goggles
- Full installation of software
- Approval from a Senior Manager
- Properly earthed power supply.
Numbers, on the other hand, look like a list of sequential instructions making up a procedure:
Startup Procedure
- Ask everybody to leave the Reception Area.
- Close and lock the doors behind you.
- At the monitor, visually confirm that the Reception Area is empty.
- Put on your protective clothing and lower your goggles.
- Press INITIATE DEFENCE SYSTEM
Unfortunately, people often treat bullets and numbers as if they were interchangeable. Mostly, we can blame Microsoft Word. If its lists were any less stable, they’d be demolished by the local authorities under building regulations!
So, rather than fiddling with numbering schemes, the busy writer uses bullets for everything:
Prerequisites
- Full protective clothing, including goggles
- Full installation of software
- Approval from a Senior Manager
- Properly earthed power supply.
Startup Procedure
- Ask everybody to leave the Reception Area.
- Close and lock the doors behind you.
- At the monitor, visually confirm that the Reception Area is empty.
- Put on your protective clothing and lower your goggles.
- Press INITIATE DEFENCE SYSTEM
As the system operator, I am now confused.
If the Startup Procedure is a sequential procedure, then the same follows for Prerequisites.
Dutifully, I put on my full safety gear. I blunder around looking for the disks, then – fumbling with gloved fingers – install the software over the existing installation (so wiping all the data). Next I lumber off to find a Senior Manager, making a mental note to drop by stores on the way back, in order to pick up a power supply…
The fellow who gets my job (once Security have thrown me into the street), is determined not to make the same mistake. To him, bullets are always a non-ordered list!
Chuckling at his predecessor’s stupidity, the new guy quickly fulfills the Prerequisites, then comes to the Startup Procedure. Obviously, he’ll work through the instructions in the most convenient order. (Later he might number them, so he can remember the quickest way of doing things.)
So it is that he leans out of the office to lock the Reception Area, then presses the INITIATE DEFENCE SYSTEM button. While the system powers up, he struggles into his protective clothing, then – a little blind now, thanks to the glare – gropes for the intercom so he can ask the several important clients to leave the affected room. They don’t seem to hear him…
