A New Resource for Effective Consumer Product Instructions: Manufacturer's Guide to Developing Consumer Product Instructions:

This paper describes a new resource for developing and evaluating consumer product instructions. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) staff, when conducting product safety assessments, often finds that the instructions provided with a product are deficient and result in consumers misassembling or misusing the product. Therefore, CPSC staff recently released the Manufacturer's Guide to Developing Consumer Product Instructions. This Guide is unique in providing a relatively comprehensive, yet compact, set of principles specifically addressing the development and evaluation of instructional material for consumer products. It has a strong human factors orientation. The approach to developing the document was based upon the behavioral sequence that must be accomplished if the final outcome is to be a change in product user behavior. The content, structure, and perspective of the Guide make it useful for human factors professionals in product design, safety research, and forensics, as well as for ...