Background
Quick start guides are becoming more popular by the day, mainly because of the growing complexity of consumer products such as television sets, cell phones, cars and software applications. This growing complexity has led to manuals that are constantly growing in size, making them less attractive to read."Quick Reference Guides: The Poetry of Technical Writing." July 6, 2008.Relevance
WhenRequirements
The requirements for setting up a quick start guide are not set in stone. It is up to the technical writer to become familiar with the mindset of the user, as well as with the character of the product. This being said, there is indeed a legal obligation, namely to refer to the complete manual (see the international IEC-82079 standard). Also, it is imperative to include instructions for safe use of the product in any QSG.Origins
In 1985 the Inmac corporation published the first Quick-Start guide with one of their 1200-baud modems, allowing the modem to be set-up and configured using the most common or default settings. The request for that type of easy set-up instructions came from aSee also
*References