Last week I conducted a poll whereby I asked iPhone users if they had ever read their device manual. There was an overwhelming response that most users weren’t even sure if there was an official iPhone manual or not.

To the question: “have you ever read your iPhone manual?” 75% of respondents stated “What iPhone Manual”. The rest of the votes were split equally between Yes and No.  At this point I should really completely absolve myself of any shred of scientific or statistical credibility in this poll.  The fact that I included the third option completely skewed the results into the realms of fun and frivolity and in fact that was what it was meant to be, and in fairness it was a very low sample of respondents. In all honesty I was just playing with the embedded polling widget, but the idea did came from a serious discussion we were having about application User Interface and User Experience and the results were exactly what I was expecting.

We are in the early stages of designing our first software product and have been working on the interface requirements. Even before we have committed pen to paper with any design or feature elements we have devised a list of critical success factors which I won’t divulge here for fear of losing out on some essential intellectual property rights... but amongst the requirements we all agree upon is that any application these days needs to have a totally killer user interface. I’d even go as far as to say that with the application we are working on, the interface IS the product.

I believe that the iPhone when released set a standard for an intuitive User Interface and to test the benchmark if you make an application intuitive enough a help manual ought to be more or less redundant.

Oh, by the way there is an iPhone manual (or User Guide as they call it).  You can download it here:
http://manuals.info.apple.com/en_US/iPhone_User_Guide.pdf