While last Friday’s BBC Radio 4 programme presented by Mark Miodownik on How to write an Instruction Manual presented an upbeat and quirky view of the history and importance of instruction manuals, the BBC’s technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones, has presented a very different view on his BBC blog. (That’s a Welsh double-L in Rory’s surname, so it’s pronounced something like ‘kethlin-jones’.)

Miodownik talked about the “amazingness” of technology, and his disappointment that the manuals for modern technology were not themselves as amazing as the technology they described. He thought that manuals that generally began with five pages of Health and Safety warnings, and had basic instructions in 17 languages crammed into one book, were “soulless”. His ideal manuals are like the “owner’s workshop manuals” for motor cars produced by Haynes publishers, and the obvious high point of the show for Miodownik was when he got to interview John Haynes himself.

Miodownik is an engineer and is fascinated by technology. He wants to know how things work, and how to take them apart to see their parts and put them back together again. He feels that manufacturers should provide details and explanations, in the style of the Haynes manuals, because otherwise the manuals may lead to a contempt for technology, which would be a very bad thing.

Cellan-Jones on the other hand has no times for manuals at all. He doesn’t want to read them, and doesn’t want to know how things work. When he buys a technology product it should just work, and how it works should be obvious and intuitive to the point where no written instructions are necessary at all. Cellan-Jones’ blog prompted dozens of “me too” responses from readers frustrated with technology and even more frustrated with poorly designed and badly written manuals.

Cellan-Jones is by no means alone in expecting technology to just work. Donald Norman, in his 1998 book The Invisible Computer, argued that technology has become too complex, and that too much of it is revealed to the user in unhelpful ways. He argued that instead of keeping the general purpose PC we should move forward to an age of “information appliances” in which there were a range of different products each designed for a single purpose, with none of their technological insides exposed to the user.

That may yet happen, but it hasn’t happened yet. From my experience as a technical writer, most products aren’t intuitive, and still do need instructions. Technical writing is about explaining technology, and about bridging the gap between amazing products and the use people want to make of them for their jobs. Instruction manuals do need to be written, not so much for people who like Miodownik want to take something apart, but for people who want to get the most out of the products they buy and become effective users. Computer software in particular continues to need a lot of explanation, and technical writers work hard to explain software not in terms of how it was written or what it is theoretically capable of doing, but in terms of how it can be used to help people do their jobs. In a recent blog article Rachel Potts has explained why software will always need help, and I agree with the points she makes. Software manufacturers who don’t provide the resources for technical writers to provide the online help and user guides their products need are not only disappointing users like Mark Miodownik who want to understand more, but they are also betraying users like Rory Cellan-Jones by pretending that their complex products are easy and intuitive to use when they really are not.