A Model of Universal Manual Design for Technical Products

Abstract: Unlike consumer technologies and electronics that have advanced and become more affordable and intuitive to use, the supplied user manuals are still using the old-fashioned book-like design. There are people who do not read the manuals, even when they are in trouble, because these book-like manuals might be too complicated or difficult to understand. There are also people who are unable to use the manuals because of reading disabilities or illiteracy. These problems can be solved with an universal design for manuals (UDM) on digital platforms. Universal design is a design approach with the goal to provide the same accessibility and usability to all people. However, there was no such published design on the market.The purpose of this research was to investigate requirements for the UDM, and create a model of it. The goal was to propose a model of UDM (MUDM) that describes how a manual can be designed on digital platforms, that is universally accessible and usable.The research method was qualitative with exploratory nature. By studying the relevant literature, scientific papers and existing manuals with high level of usability, a list of the requirements for UDM was compiled and analyzed. Based on the findings from the studies, a model of UDM was created which describes an implementation of the manual as a mobile application on smartphones.The model consists of two diagrams, a flow-chart diagram which describes the navigation and the structure of the application, and a package diagram which covers interaction methods, layouts, components, and information presentation methods. The model covers all the found requirements for UDM, which implies that the model includes methods to achieve all these requirements.