100 Ways to Succeed #133:

Excellence in Manuals

Check every bit of instructional material in the joint—internal as well as that with which customers and vendors interact:

Clear?
Beautiful?
Simple? (Yet complete?)
Practice opportunities (à la EpiPen)?
Etc?
EXCELLENCE?

Odds are VERY high that you don’t put in enough effort on internal and external material.

Work on it as a group. Test it with strangers. Test it with your spouse. Test it with your kids. Test it with the guy at the auto body shop. Etc.

Be like the Golden Gate bridge painters who never stop—finish one painting then immediately start over. Likewise, pick off some single instructional material and evaluate it—continue on a measured basis forever.

This is a very big deal. Here I go again with more bureaucracy: You need a very senior person, perhaps a VP and Chief Userfriendly Instructional Design of Bloody Everything—she should be independent of the prettify designers.

(User friendliness and clarity and simplicity are at least as important to Apple as is its gorgeous external design.)

Tom Peters posted this on August 8, 2008, in Success Tips.
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