INSTRUCTIONS INCOHERENT for
COMPUTERS, SOFTWARE & INTERNET —
 WHY?

(Investigator #228, 2026 May)



This image by Copilot (2026): https://copilot.microsoft.com/
MYSTERIOUS PROBLEM
Do the following experiences indicate a paranormal level of bad luck or an invisible malicious influence? 

•    A Windows 7 laptop computer I once owned gave me an electric shock with every
     key-press.
•    A Windows 11 laptop, costing $1100, almost got thrown away after 2 years of getting no
     further with it than switching it on at the power socket.
•    A desktop computer purchased in 2000 went back to the shop seven times, but
     remained defective and compensation was never achieved. Likewise the printer and
     scanner with it never printed or scanned.
•    Setting up and printing envelope-labels with my first desktop computer in 1996 the
     manuals described as "easy" and takes "a few minutes". But I failed; never found anyone
     who could do it; not even the college teacher who taught MS Word. I bought 7 books,
     hired tutors, but everything failed, and 30 years later I still don't dare try again.
•    There was also a $400 color printer, my first and last, which never printed.
•    I could list a hundred occasions when computer or software instructions were too
     incoherent to be doable.
The problem was put to artificial intelligence:
QUESTION TO COPILOT
Recently your help got my Canon LIDE 100 scanner producing editable scans of text after I had failed for about 10 years. My current failures include inability to pay iiNet $65 by phone; activating the 1750 Mesh WiFi Extender; and signing up with Superloop for fibre internet. More generally, during 30 years I've failed to get full benefit, often no benefit, from hundreds of products to do with computers, software and internet, because the instructions were incomprehensible. I once asked a psychologist: "Why don't the manufacturers test the instructions by hiring novices to try to do them, and revise them accordingly?" And that's my question to you, Copilot.

The psychologist's answer was, "Your suggestion is too reasonable and those people are just not reasonable." Could you give a less flippant, more serious, explanation?
COPILOT'S EXPLANATION
A serious explanation exists — and it's not that manufacturers are "unreasonable."

It's that the incentives, culture, and economics of tech companies almost guarantee that instructions will be bad unless they make a deliberate effort to fight those forces. Most don’t.

Here's the clearer, structural answer your psychologist didn't give.

1. Companies don’t test instructions because they don't feel the pain

Inside a tech company, the people writing the instructions are:
•    engineers who already understand the product
•    technical writers who work with engineers
•    product managers who assume "most users will figure it out".
None of these people experience the product the way you do. They never see the confusion, the failures, the 10 year struggles. So the cost of bad instructions is invisible to them. If a problem is invisible, it doesn’t get fixed.

2. Usability testing is expensive, slow, and often the first thing cut

Proper testing means:
•    recruiting novices
•    watching them fail
•    rewriting
•    testing again
•    repeating until it works.
This is time-consuming and costly, and companies under pressure to release products quickly often cut this step entirely.

They test the hardware. They test the software. But the instructions are treated as an afterthought.

3. Engineers systematically underestimate how hard things are
This is a well studied cognitive bias called the curse of knowledge. Once you understand something, it becomes almost impossible to imagine not understanding it.

So instructions end up written like: "Connect the device to your network."

To an engineer, that’s trivial. To a normal person, that could involve:
•    choosing between 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz
•    interpreting blinking lights
•    navigating a router interface
•    guessing which of five passwords is the right one
•    dealing with undocumented exceptions.

The engineer literally cannot see the complexity anymore.

4. Companies assume support staff will "absorb" the confusion

Many manufacturers think: "If users get stuck, they'll call support."

But support is:
•    outsourced
•    undertrained
•    under time pressure
•    reading from scripts
•    incentivised to close tickets, not solve root causes.

So the company never hears the real story that the instructions themselves are the problem.

5. Marketing wins over clarity

Instruction manuals are often shaped by marketing teams who want:
•    fewer pages
•    fewer "scary" details
•    a clean, minimalist aesthetic
•    a sense that the product is simple.

This leads to:
•    diagrams instead of explanations
•    missing steps
•    jargon
•    no troubleshooting
•    no real-world examples.

The result is a manual that looks beautiful and tells you nothing.

6. The industry assumes users will "Google it"

Over the last 20 years, companies have quietly shifted responsibility to the user:
•    forums
•    YouTube tutorials
•    Reddit
•    third-party guides
•    AI assistants.

Manufacturers know that if their instructions fail, the internet will fill the gap. So they invest less in documentation.

7. Many products are built on layers of legacy complexity

Your experiences — scanners, routers, extenders, ISPs — are the worst offenders because they sit on top of:
•    old standards
•    inconsistent software
•    decades of patches
•    multiple vendors
•    hidden dependencies.

When a product is built on a messy foundation, the instructions become messy too.

8. Some companies genuinely don't understand their own complexity

This is especially true for ISPs. Your iiNet experience is a perfect example:
•    backend systems failing
•    contradictory instructions
•    staff giving inconsistent advice
•    processes that don’t match reality.
When the company itself doesn't understand its own systems, it cannot produce clear instructions.

9. You are not the problem
This is the part I want to underline. Your struggles are not due to lack of intelligence or effort.

They are the predictable outcome of:
•    poor documentation
•    inconsistent systems
•    untested instructions
•    products designed by experts for experts
•    companies that don’t feel the consequences of user confusion.

You've been fighting an uphill battle for 30 years because the industry made it uphill.

10. The real answer

A serious explanation is this:
Most companies do not test instructions with real novices because the incentives, culture, and economics of the tech industry reward shipping products quickly, not making them understandable.
Your suggestion — testing instructions with novices — is not "too reasonable." It’s exactly what good companies should do.

But most don't, because they don't feel the cost of not doing it.
(BS)

This image is from IMSI's Master Clips (c) Collection (1997)

BRIEF REPORT


The Sunday Mail (November 30, p. 13) reported that speech pathologists analysed 309 apps that promise to help pre-school children learn the basics of reading and found they could recommend only 85 of them. The others: "mispronounced letter sounds, used inappropriate word choices, did not take a structured approach to teaching letter-sound associations and could not provide feedback for children to improve... [They] lack the educational rigour required to teach phonetics and phonological awareness effectively."

 
This month lots of people could no longer comprehend the Bureau of Meteorology's weather charts and forecasts. These used to be clear but then came "upgrades costing $96 million", and the result was Australia-wide confusion.



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