The way of the future: documentation seamlessly integrated with the product
I recently bought a Livescribe Pulse Smartpen, and was quite impressed with the way the documentation and help was integrated into the product.
The smartpen is an electronic pen that records both sound and text strokes as you write. It uses an infra-red camera and special paper printed with a grid of dots that tells the computer inside the pen where it is at any specific moment. You can tap on your notes on the page to replay the sound recorded while you were writing that particular text. It works in conjunction with software that you load onto your computer, which you use to store and replay your notes—audio and text. It’s ideal for taking notes at meetings and lectures, and this is where it is marketed.
By its very nature it makes for some innovative documentation methods and Livescribe have used these well. Each part of the documentation is simple enough, but combined they add up to a whole that really impressed me. By documentation here I mean audio visual. I’m not just talking written documents here but how-to videos and so on.
The pen comes supplied in the box with the following documentation:
- A single sheet giving the URL of the support site to download the associated desktop software
- A quick-install guide—again, pointing you to the web site
- A fold-out sheet containing brief intstructions on how to use the smartpen
- A journal. This journal is the actual book you write in, but it also contains some documentation
Outside of documentation the package contains the pen itself, a USB cradle that you use to connect the pen to your PC, a headset and some accessories (e.g. extra nibs).
The USB cradle had a paper sticker around it telling you not to plug it into your computer until you had installed the desktop software. You had to tear the label to unwrap the cable. This is probably the best example I have seen in a long time of preventing you from doing something that you might otherwise instinctively do—in this case, plug the USB cable into a port on your PC before you were ready.
The installation instructions were a small, double-sided sheet of paper. They were simple. Go to this page, and to download your desktop program.
Once at the site, an ‘Introducing Pulse’ video starts playing. It’s only 15 seconds long, and its main function is to point you to the other four videos that you can watch to show you how the smartpen works.
While you wait for the download to finish (big, clear buttons for this, and clearly differentiated from the videos) you can watch the four training videos. They’re short, around a minute for each and cover:
- An introduction to your smartpen
- How to set the date and time
- Using the headset
- How to use the desktop program.
This is really all you need to know to start using the smartpen. I like the way you don’t have to move away from a single screen to learn how to use the pen.
But if that was all, I might have said, “Well, that’s nicely done,” and thought nothing more of it.
But Livescribe’s piece de resistance is their journal.
The journal that comes with the pen is a tutorial as well. They devote two pages of the journal to tutorials. They give written instructions on what to do, and you use the pen to practise what they’re talking about.
The bottom of each page contains standard control functions. On the two tutorial pages, these functions come with an information ‘i’ above them. Tap on the ‘i’ and the smartpen tells you how to use that particular function.
It also comes with with an interactive demo card. This is the size of a credit card and the front contains three graphics which you tap on to see two small films (it’s amazing how much you can video you can pack into a 96×18 pixel display) and a demo on the stereo headphones. The back of the card contains a demo of the translation component, and also shows you how to draw up a keyboard and play it.
I didn’t have any problems following any of their instructions, and playing around with the tutorial pages and the demo card gave me a good feel for the pen and how it worked. I felt comfortable using the pen very quickly.
Obviously the nature of the tool allows for some good interaction between the tool and the documentation. Even so, it is an impressive blending of tool and help. I think they have done a good job.
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