"Making the Most of Service Manuals"

[Fred Ridder]

Chris Borokowski wrote (in part):
 
> For the divergence in user groups, with some being experts and others
> being new, there are a number of strategies you can use when planning
> the documentation. One is to publish a "pocket guide" that's a
> telegraphic summary of common procedures, and variations. Another is to
> offer a "cookbook" to show common use cases to new users. One that I
> favor is to give new users a powerful introduction in the first
> chapter, and then offer "summaries" on each subsequent chapter which
> contain the short version of events the experts will want.
 
A variation on the third approach that can work well in the Service Manual
context is to present each procedure twice, first as a checklist with bare-
bones descriptions of each step, then in a detailed procedure where each
steps starts with the same description as the checklist so that it's clear
the two directly correspond. The technician can print out or photocopy 
the checklist page and actually check off each step as it's completed,
whether or not they are reading the detailed instructions.
 
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