User manuals – What do you think?

[YannChris]

Hello Beoworlders,

In a fading past, products were delivered with paper user guides, sometimes 2 documents (user guide and reference book).

These were really helpful as they often contained informations on advanced features of the product and you could download them from B&O’s website.

I used to read them carefully before purchase, in order to think on the best way to use the product and include it in my setup.

Now this time seems to be over and available user guides for new products are limited to very short FAQs which are limited to basic questions.

And all you can download are mandatory security advices which tells nothing useful.

What are your thoughts about this new policy?

Kind regards,

Yann.

 

[matteventu]

I think the problem is not even the lack of paper based manuals included with the products, but the fact that even the proper user manuals that you can download in PDF or the “FAQs” in support.bang-olufsen.com are a complete mess.

Features which are not reported anywhere, support pages that are copied-pasted between different products (where a direct copy-paste is not applicable in terms of “support advice”), and a bunch of redundant and repeated Q&As, split across unlogical categories, that nobody would ever ask or they are presented with a completely dumb title that makes the page seem about something that it’s not actually about.

 

A total clusterfuck.

 

Not to talk about some of the screenshots and images, which are probably in the magnitude of 100x50px of resolution and are shown at 10x5cm size in the page.

I honestly believe the support site and support materials are some of the cheapest-looking things of B&O product collateral.

[Madskp]

One problem I see with manuals for newer products is that software updates may changes how the products work. Even functions of buttons can be changed over a products lifetime.

Furthermore some products are dependent on third parties (Apple, Google, Spotify ect.) where the behaviour from these services also may change over time.

And then there is the interactions with linked products that also can affect the picture.

Therefore a manual for modern Audio streamer and/or TV is not a static document and need to be updated over time to reflect the current state of the product.

So guess it’s not that simple to implement a relevant user manual for modern products

 

 

[matteventu]

I do understand the concerns you’re raising, but it’s still much simpler than you make it to be actually 🙂

There are ways around that – B&O support pages and manuals are absolutely inexcusable.

[Author]

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