It can't be that hard

When did you last buy a new techno-toy...
...look at the manual...
...carefully put away (or carelessly throw away) the manual...
...and say "I'll work it out on my own"?

When did you last get stuck trying to figure out a new techno-toy on your own...
...heave a deep sigh...
...and consult the manual - only to find that it made you feel as though your head might explode?

Is it just me, or does the average manual make things sound hard?

It's a new year. It's a good time for a new view of things. Try this on for size: Nothing is as hard as it sounds when your subject-matter experts tell you about it. Nothing. Because inside every arcane, elegant, hackish implementation that takes half an hour to explain is a beautifully simple idea. As technical communicators, it's our job to listen for the faint, pure song of that simple idea. It's our job to tune out the cacophonous techno-babble that normally drowns it, and let the music of that simple idea be heard loud and clear.

Sometimes we get push-back from our subject-matter experts if we strip away the tech talk - particularly if they have taken the trouble to write explanations for us. (This, by the way, is as good an argument as any for never asking your subject-matter experts to write anything for you.) But I've found that I can win over even a fussy subject-matter expert by explaining that I am trying to showcase the brilliance of the design, and that customers will see it more clearly if it's in layman's terms. True brilliance in product design is in implementing a simple idea and concealing the complexity of the implementation. The people at Apple know this, and it's made the company a huge success.

It's not just Apple. There's a lot of talk about Web 2.0 being all about user-generated content, but what makes that possible is the true core of Web 2.0: If it's hard, nobody will use it. Everything is easy.

Hard to use, hard to read, hard to understand - we're done with that. Everything is easy.

How does your product documentation look? Find the essential simplicity and take out the rest.