Many many (so many) years ago I used to collaborate with a University magazine at the technical editing side (aka desktop publishing) and transforming it from real paper and scissors to digital editing with copy&paste and everything else was a painful process: software loading from diskettes, new process to learn and tedious hours moving some text that refused to took its place or some drawing that moves too far or too close to the surrounding text. Tedious but rewarding task!
Fast forwarding to the present having some spare time and a new keyboard to play with, one of the first thing that noticed was that paper version of instruction manual is a bit uncomfortable to use. Again.
My first step was to take a look at the product page searching for its digital version but wasn’t able to find anything of the sort. Zero. Nada. A simple search at DuckDuckGo left me with the same discomfort and a new opportunity for improvement 😁️
This time using my MVP mindset just grabbed my phone and take a picture of each page from instruction manual and took no more than 2 minutes. Very impressive for a 5 page manual, isn’t it? 😜️
Sooner than I expected an astonishing discovery blew my happiness away: had to zoom on every page to take a look at the instructions and sometimes perform some zooming/scrolling here and there just to read a simple line. Adding insult to injury no search for titles or any text is available in pictures 😭️ making me spend some extra time to locate what I was looking for. Still very raw for an MVP success case and wasn’t able to make my point on the flexibility of digital vs paper.
Suddenly remembered that my phone has two builtin features that could help me make this a better experience : cropping (let the the manual pages fill the whole picture) and OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to extract text from images.
Let’s take a step by step view to the complete process on one page only (repeated for each page of the manual)
Conclusion
The final MVP, with text copy&paste and formatting, took no more than half an hour and the process was really straightforward and intuitive . What made this process so enjoyable from my perspective? A handful of tools, concepts and abstractions in seamless cooperation :
- Touch screen interface makes it more intuitive UI and UX
- No install needed (even if install were needed a cell phone experience is usually better than its desktop counterpart on software install)
- Standardization (links, URLs, PDF format and so on)
- Free access software
Hope you enjoyed reading this article as much as I enjoyed writing it. Live long and prosper 🖖️
PS: the Instructions Manual for Redragon K530 Draconic Compact RGB Wireless Mechanical Keyboard is free to access. Also the manual f
or suggesting changes and point me to typos or formatting errors can be accessed!!
