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Date:
February 9, 2001 We chose to evaluate "The CAT User's Manual". We decided to evaluate this manual because we both have experience with this model and feel we can do a thorough analysis of the owner's manual. There are some important aspects of this manual that we think Andreas should be made aware of. The areas that need to be reevaluated over this entire manual are completeness of the descriptions of the various characteristics of the CAT. Making this manual more oriented to the lay person who may possess a CAT would be helpful. More visuals would be a great benefit in the next edition of this manual. Under the category of completeness your manual needs more graphics to help clear up some of the instructions that are being described, such as the self-cleaning feature. It would also be very helpful if you would add a table of contents so that the individual using the CAT could flip directly to the section they are looking for. Another problem we noticed was all the acronyms throughout this manual. It would help the reader to understand what you are trying to say if you included a glossary of the acronyms, such as, CAT, ROM, KIT, BASIC, CACHE, and BYTE. Visuals: The CAT User's Manual is in desperate need of more visual material. The manual contains only one picture, which itself isn't that good. More pictures would make the manual easier to follow and make it a better manual overall. The only graphic the manual has is at the beginning, showing a silhouette of a full-bodied CAT, which in our opinion is a poor representation of a CAT to a beginning user; a color picture of a real CAT would do a better job of instructing the user what a CAT looks like, especially compared to the picture used. More pictures are definitely needed to help explain what the manual is saying. Most or all of the main sections should have at least one picture to help summarize or add to what the section or a part of the section is saying. Included are four pictures that would help the user visualize what is said in their specific sections. Usability: The usability of the manual needs to be worked on. We would read something in the manual which caught our attention, then, later on when we went to find it again, we had difficulty, sometimes extreme difficulty, finding what we had read earlier. This didn't happen to us only once, either; this happened to us on several occasions. A table of contents would really be useful to avoid such situations. However, to be most useful, the table of contents would have to be detailed, and not simply list the main sections and what page they are on. Listing some main ideas from each section, especially the larger sections, in the table of contents would be extremely useful and would improve the usability of the manual. Inside certain sections of the manual, ideas seem choppy and the content inside of those sections don't flow well. For the most part, each idea in those sections are discussed thoroughly and clearly, and can be understood after reading one or two times, although some ideas have too much jargon and acronyms in them that can confuse the reader. However, because ideas don't flow well from one idea to another, it makes the manual harder to read through, which can frustrate a reader trying to read through the whole manual at one time. On the bright side, the manual is very thorough, covering many sections and ideas dealing with CATs. One section that is missing, however, that should be added, is a troubleshooting section at the end of the manual. There is a "warning notices" section and a "documented problems" section of the manual, but a troubleshooting section at the end of the manual that answered questions to serious problems dealing with CATs would be extremely useful. Problems are almost certain to happen with CATs, and having answers to those problems listed at the end of the manual would help the user deal with the problem in the quickest and best way possible.
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