Who Read Product Guides By the Way?

Is guide writing a waste exercise? There are so many reports, which say that people around the world, always find product guides as unavoidable nuisance. Frankly speaking, most of the customers (end users) do not read guides, which are supplied along with their new products. End users always try to handle new products, as if they know quite well in advance about how to deal or use them although they are handling it for the first time. With imagined functionality knowledge, they press buttons here and there located on the product without making any effort to read the guide. When the product starts behaving bizarrely, only then they try to go through the provided guide in a haphazard manner. They expect that the solution for their current problem should appear instantly when they open the product guide. Moreover, when they cannot find the solution immediately, they pickup the phone, call the Product Support Team to bash them about selling such a lousy product, and to request a readymade solution to fix the product to make it work immediately.

Technical writers do more research before they start writing about the product. They try to cover every feature of the product while writing the guide keeping the target audience in mind. A single product needs to be presented in different kinds and categories of guides depending upon the types of end users. Different reviewers will review every guide. The reviewer attempts the tasks explained in the guide makes sure that everything is written properly. Once all the documentation revisions are over, only then, the guide will be shipped along with the new product.

End users won’t give much importance to the product guide. S/he concentrates more on the product and its interface to understand about the product functionality. Very rarely, the end user reads the product guide to understand the underlying functionality. However, after reading a few pages, s/he complains about the new terminology used in the guide without going through the glossary, which explains the terminology part that is located at the end of the guide.
Overall, it seems that customers need instant knowledge. When they stuck somewhere while operating the product, they show no patience to refer the guide and get the solution. They want solution instantly. No matter how and where it comes from. And one more interesting research topic is that the end user is more inclined to listen than to read whenever s/he face problem with the product.

So keeping the preceding context in view, this article questions whether is there any need to write linear guides with so much patience by the writer.

Please let me know your thoughts and comments about this topic.