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User Manual Template
Use this simple user guide template to create interactive documentation and ensure customers’ success with your product.
Fact: Your customers need a manual. It provides them with all of the information and instructions to set up and use your product successfully.
We set out to build the best user manual template, so you can easily make a great guide for your customers.
Our template is:
- Easy to create and maintain. Build a great manual, fast, and keep it up to date as your product evolves.
- More engaging and effective. Our interactive format is proven to be a more effective way to guide customers.
- Available wherever customers need it. Add your template to your website, embed it in your help center or share it with a link.
Below, you can find a complete guide to writing and creating user manuals. You’ll learn why you need strong user documentation, the top characteristics of a good user guide, and how to ensure that your manual will provide all the necessary information to customers
Why are user manuals so critical?
User documentation - user manuals, user guides, instruction manuals, etc. - offers customers all of the content they need to start and use a product or a service successfully.
Your user documentation can take many forms, depending on the product or service it relates to and its complexity. It will often include assembly instructions (think IKEA), as well as operating instructions that can show you how to operate and maintain a product.
There are a few main reasons you’ll want to create a great user manual:
1. Documentation enhances the user experience
Customers purchase products to enjoy their benefits. They get a new mattress to sleep in greater comfort. A new dishwasher relieves them of the burden of hand-washing dishes, while perhaps also reducing the household’s energy and water consumption, and so on.
A great user manual is the person’s gateway to achieving their desired benefits through the joy of ownership and product usage. Because of that, a user manual is an integral part of the user experience.
You can see it most clearly when you consider the alternative: purchasing a product with insufficient documentation. In such a case, a customer must either figure out the product on their own or reach out to the company’s support for help.
Neither situation is ideal, and both reduce their experience as product users.
2. User manuals provide self-help reference
Similarly, a strong user guide will continue to support a person’s product usage. It becomes the first point of reference for any challenges or unusual product behavior. For example, documentation can help you interpret an error message on the product’s control panel and show you how to resolve it.
This is an incredibly important issue, given that 81% of customers prefer to resolve any issues themselves through documentation and a knowledge base before reaching out to the company for help.
3. Documentation reduces your support team’s workload
Much like in the example above, documentation can take over for your support teams, leaving them free to assist customers with more severe issues. Creating user guides that provide comprehensive information and assistance will lead to fewer support hours wasted on resolving simple queries. Plus, it shortens the wait times for customers who have encountered significant issues with the product.
4. Good instruction manuals will boost post-sale customer satisfaction
Finally, a good instruction manual will provide the foundation for successful product usage, resulting in much stronger post-sale satisfaction and loyalty with the company.
But what makes a good user guide? What should go into a user manual?
How to create a strong user manual that will delight your users
Let’s begin with a little exercise. Think of a user manual you’ve opened recently. Which of its elements can you remember?
It’s likely that the manual had a table of contents of some sort. It may have included an overview of product elements, typically in a visual form. It was probably logically laid out, starting with legal information, a general overview of the product, and advice on maintaining it. It was relatively easy to understand, too. There was probably visual information in it, including images and drawings of the product and its components to better understand their various intricacies.
It’s likely that you’ll find those elements in almost every product instruction manual. Why? Because they form the basic characteristics of good user documentation.
1. Simple language
The first aspect of a good user manual is that it’s relatively easy to understand. Granted, it might contain more technically-oriented sections. However, all information relating to assembly and product usage is typically easy to comprehend.
The reason for that is simple. The manual is tailored to an average user.
If your product helps coders, engineers, or any other technically-minded people, you can write the documentation at their level. But if you sell to an average person, the language must resemble the way they communicate.
Tip: Never assume that a customer has an in-depth knowledge of your product and the technical background to intuitively understand how it works. Always cover all the necessary information that will help them get up to speed easily.
2. Logical structure with a clear table of contents
Strong documentation guides a person through the process of getting to know the product. This starts with a clear table of contents that helps a user understand what information the documentation covers and where to look for assistance when they’re stuck or experience problems with the product.
The table of contents should reside at the beginning of the document, so a user doesn’t have to sort through pages to find the information they’re after. The table of contents should also include all the major headings and subheadings of the document.
3. Searchability
There is a major benefit to creating electronic, interactive user manuals that live online. Users can search such documents and find and access them quickly. In many cases, they can skip the table of contents altogether, although you should retain it in the document for others who prefer to find advice this way.
4. Clear and engaging design
Given the importance of strong user manuals, it’s also a good idea to make them nice to look at. Nobody enjoys unreadable pages crammed with small text and product diagrams that you can hardly see.
If you make the design clear and engaging, users are more likely to get value from the documentation.
Making a user manual look good doesn’t take much. Use large, high-quality images, stay consistent with typography and colors, and adhere to your company’s branding guidelines. Following these simple rules will yield user documentation that resembles your brand and looks nice and familiar to customers.
5. List of additional resources
Not all information can fit into a user manual, and you can’t always predict the exact issues or questions customers might have. That’s why the documentation should also include directions on where to find additional information, such as:
- How to contact support
- What to do when a person cannot resolve their issue
- Warranty and return policies
End the user manual with a list of additional resources to assist a customer, should they need such information.
User Manual Template
Use this simple user guide template to create interactive documentation and ensure customers’ success with your product.
Fact: Your customers need a manual. It provides them with all of the information and instructions to set up and use your product successfully.
We set out to build the best user manual template, so you can easily make a great guide for your customers.
Our template is:
- Easy to create and maintain. Build a great manual, fast, and keep it up to date as your product evolves.
- More engaging and effective. Our interactive format is proven to be a more effective way to guide customers.
- Available wherever customers need it. Add your template to your website, embed it in your help center or share it with a link.
Below, you can find a complete guide to writing and creating user manuals. You’ll learn why you need strong user documentation, the top characteristics of a good user guide, and how to ensure that your manual will provide all the necessary information to customers
Why are user manuals so critical?
User documentation - user manuals, user guides, instruction manuals, etc. - offers customers all of the content they need to start and use a product or a service successfully.
Your user documentation can take many forms, depending on the product or service it relates to and its complexity. It will often include assembly instructions (think IKEA), as well as operating instructions that can show you how to operate and maintain a product.
There are a few main reasons you’ll want to create a great user manual:
1. Documentation enhances the user experience
Customers purchase products to enjoy their benefits. They get a new mattress to sleep in greater comfort. A new dishwasher relieves them of the burden of hand-washing dishes, while perhaps also reducing the household’s energy and water consumption, and so on.
A great user manual is the person’s gateway to achieving their desired benefits through the joy of ownership and product usage. Because of that, a user manual is an integral part of the user experience.
You can see it most clearly when you consider the alternative: purchasing a product with insufficient documentation. In such a case, a customer must either figure out the product on their own or reach out to the company’s support for help.
Neither situation is ideal, and both reduce their experience as product users.
2. User manuals provide self-help reference
Similarly, a strong user guide will continue to support a person’s product usage. It becomes the first point of reference for any challenges or unusual product behavior. For example, documentation can help you interpret an error message on the product’s control panel and show you how to resolve it.
This is an incredibly important issue, given that 81% of customers prefer to resolve any issues themselves through documentation and a knowledge base before reaching out to the company for help.
3. Documentation reduces your support team’s workload
Much like in the example above, documentation can take over for your support teams, leaving them free to assist customers with more severe issues. Creating user guides that provide comprehensive information and assistance will lead to fewer support hours wasted on resolving simple queries. Plus, it shortens the wait times for customers who have encountered significant issues with the product.
4. Good instruction manuals will boost post-sale customer satisfaction
Finally, a good instruction manual will provide the foundation for successful product usage, resulting in much stronger post-sale satisfaction and loyalty with the company.
But what makes a good user guide? What should go into a user manual?
How to create a strong user manual that will delight your users
Let’s begin with a little exercise. Think of a user manual you’ve opened recently. Which of its elements can you remember?
It’s likely that the manual had a table of contents of some sort. It may have included an overview of product elements, typically in a visual form. It was probably logically laid out, starting with legal information, a general overview of the product, and advice on maintaining it. It was relatively easy to understand, too. There was probably visual information in it, including images and drawings of the product and its components to better understand their various intricacies.
It’s likely that you’ll find those elements in almost every product instruction manual. Why? Because they form the basic characteristics of good user documentation.
1. Simple language
The first aspect of a good user manual is that it’s relatively easy to understand. Granted, it might contain more technically-oriented sections. However, all information relating to assembly and product usage is typically easy to comprehend.
The reason for that is simple. The manual is tailored to an average user.
If your product helps coders, engineers, or any other technically-minded people, you can write the documentation at their level. But if you sell to an average person, the language must resemble the way they communicate.
Tip: Never assume that a customer has an in-depth knowledge of your product and the technical background to intuitively understand how it works. Always cover all the necessary information that will help them get up to speed easily.
2. Logical structure with a clear table of contents
Strong documentation guides a person through the process of getting to know the product. This starts with a clear table of contents that helps a user understand what information the documentation covers and where to look for assistance when they’re stuck or experience problems with the product.
The table of contents should reside at the beginning of the document, so a user doesn’t have to sort through pages to find the information they’re after. The table of contents should also include all the major headings and subheadings of the document.
3. Searchability
There is a major benefit to creating electronic, interactive user manuals that live online. Users can search such documents and find and access them quickly. In many cases, they can skip the table of contents altogether, although you should retain it in the document for others who prefer to find advice this way.
4. Clear and engaging design
Given the importance of strong user manuals, it’s also a good idea to make them nice to look at. Nobody enjoys unreadable pages crammed with small text and product diagrams that you can hardly see.
If you make the design clear and engaging, users are more likely to get value from the documentation.
Making a user manual look good doesn’t take much. Use large, high-quality images, stay consistent with typography and colors, and adhere to your company’s branding guidelines. Following these simple rules will yield user documentation that resembles your brand and looks nice and familiar to customers.
5. List of additional resources
Not all information can fit into a user manual, and you can’t always predict the exact issues or questions customers might have. That’s why the documentation should also include directions on where to find additional information, such as:
- How to contact support
- What to do when a person cannot resolve their issue
- Warranty and return policies
End the user manual with a list of additional resources to assist a customer, should they need such information.
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