How To Write an Instruction Manual — Step-By-Step Guide With Examples

When faced with an issue, the first thing that most customers do is search online.

But unfortunately, many businesses don’t invest much into crafting self-help channels (instruction manuals). Which results in an overwhelming number of support tickets and added costs.

In some cases, products only come with a physical instruction manual. And we all know what happens with all those instruction manuals (gets thrown away or ignored when we see them).

A study by Statista poll found that 88%¹ of users want businesses to offer an online self-help experience.

To improve your self-help channels, you should first start putting your instructions manuals online, and improve them over time.

In this guide we covered a lot on how you can create or write instruction manuals that will help you improve your customer experience, and reduce hefty support costs.

Let’s get started!

What Is an Instruction Manual?

An instruction manual, also referred to as a user guide or user manual, is a crucial piece of documentation that conveys technological, engineering, scientific, or other technical knowledge to help customers use a product, piece of equipment, or solution.

Every time I listen to the word ‘instruction manual,’ it brings up images of various series of instructions about how to operate gadgets, put together furnishings, fix hardware, and perform regular upkeep of machinery.

IKEA instruction manual example demonstrating the precise steps for putting together a chair.

Nearly every product, no matter if it’s physical or digital, comes with a user manual to let customers get familiar with it fast. The manual contains comprehensive details about processes, benchmarks, rules, common issues, and features.

Why Is an Instruction Manual Important?

A well-written instruction manual is a core component of product development, and it directly impacts customer satisfaction. Sometimes, it may also be required for a business to comply with legal requirements.

These documents are among the most frequent and crucial pieces of technical communication. Every time you buy an appliance or a product, a user guide is usually bundled with it.

Some more reasons are:

1. Safety: Instruction manual helps users safely use product, without injuring self or a damaging product.
2. Reduced cost: It helps reduce the burden on the customer support team by reducing the number of tickets. By allowing customers to solve problems on their own.
3. Enhanced user experience: A well written instruction manual helps enhance customer experience and satisfaction.
4. Compliance: In some cases, instruction manuals are required to comply with legal policies. For example, pharma and healthcare industries.

What Are the Types of Instruction Manuals?

Instruction manuals are a part of product/user manuals or self-help channels, which focuses on clear instructions.

It can be used in various ways, including:

Product/user manuals: A user manual includes primary steps that show customers how to assemble/install a product, how it works, and how to make the most of it. We have a complete guide on the user manual if you want to learn more.

Training manuals: A training manual is a series of guidelines that explain how to carry out a task, procedure, or assignment.

Service/maintenance manuals: A service manual is a collection of directions for customers about maintaining a certain piece of equipment at various phases throughout its lifespan.

Operation manuals: An operations guide is a manual that contains your business’s knowledge about job titles, duties, and operations.

Policy and procedure manuals: Policies and procedures record an organization’s protocols, processes, and standard practices.

Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs): A standard operating procedure offers straightforward direction to the employees of a company regarding the steps of standard workflows.

How To Write an Instruction Manual

An effective instruction manual offers customers fast and in-depth solutions to the queries they may have regarding your product.

According to Wyzowl’s latest research, 80%² of customers uninstall applications or programs if they don’t understand how to operate them. Plus, 55% of buyers will give back a product or ask for their money back for the same reason.

Here’s how you can write instruction manuals that will actually help your customers and increase sales.

1. Set the Goal of Your Manual

Set a clear objective to determine the suitable content and design for your instruction manual. Figure out the outcome users would achieve with the manual.

To start writing a practical guide, you need a concrete goal. Every user manual is intended to provide a solution to a customer’s concern. You have to identify this issue to craft an actually beneficial user guide and address the issue.

Generally, the instruction manual goal is to walk people through a process that will enable them to finish a task.

Plus, every user manual is supposed to have a certain result. If you can figure this out, you can choose its material and layout more wisely.

2. Plan and Gather the Contents of Your Manual

Gather all the necessary information. Clarify what you want to cover in your instruction manual to avoid overwhelming readers with information as well as any confusion.

To make a productive instruction manual, it’s important to have a clear understanding of what kind of information you intend to put in it.

You should be aware of the topics that you want to include in your user guide to prevent overwhelming the reader with too much knowledge.

Gather and incorporate all the essential materials, checklists, and procedures. Ensure that you cover every aspect in detail and have all the resources you require to pen down the manual.

For example, Sharkninja’s pressure cooker and air fryer includes an extremely hands-on user manual whose goal extends beyond just helping customers with the installation. It includes cooking instructions and detailed information on many recipes to help users make the most of the product.

3. Consider Your Audience

Create a user persona to start thinking from their perspective and determine what to include in the manual.

You can begin by identifying their characteristics, wants, and pain points. It will help you understand your reader’s knowledge of the subject matter, how they interact with your product, their overall openness to grasp new knowledge, and their way of absorbing information.

For example, how a grown up can follow instructions is way different from how a kid can follow.

A text heavy instruction will definitely not work for toys that need to be self-assembled.

Instruction manual example for assembling a Gorilla toy, source: CreativeBloq

Identifying your readers also helps in deciding the extent and presentation of the information to cover in the instruction manual.

4. Use Plain Language

Use clear, simple words and avoid complex language. Write short sentences and if you use a technical term, define it or include a link to the glossary (Learn how to create a Glossary with WordPress).

Your content must be straightforward, plain, and easily comprehensible.

For instance, take a look at this user manual with simple directions written in active voice.

Image Source: Instrktiv

5. Enhance With Visuals

Add visuals (such as images and videos) to your content rather than filling it with text only. This will catch users’ attention and increase engagement.

According to a study by TechSmith, a majority of individuals (83%)³ favor viewing videos over reading how-to guides or knowledge base material.

To be honest, user guides are not always interesting. They may contain a lot of written content that doesn’t hold a reader’s attention.

On the other hand, using video clips and photos is more effective in conveying information than relying solely on written material.

For instance, back to the IKEA user guide example. It doesn’t even contain a single line of text meant for users. Yet, it’s very precise and useful.

If you don’t include graphics, your instruction manual will become overwhelming with walls of text, without any element to divide it or engage customers.

Incorporating videos and images in your digital user guide can be an excellent method to increase user interaction and aid users successfully.

I will highly recommend you to create image based instructional manuals (similar to IKEA example) if you are selling physical products and if the product is for limited use.

6. Involve Subject Matter Experts

Writing a useful instruction manual is a challenging task, and you cannot treat it lightly. The users of your product are looking up to you for support as they depend on the knowledge given in the user guide.

One effective strategy to avoid overlooking or inaccurately conveying essential details is to seek the assistance of experts such as product managers and engineers.

You can assemble your colleagues and begin working as a team on the manual.

You can get your manuals reviewed from different groups, from developers/engineers to designers and end consumers.

7. Styling Instruction Manuals

Instruction manuals aren’t storybooks, they are practical steps on how to use your product or resolve a problem when it arises.

No one studies a user guide from beginning to end, but rather in portions. Buyers want to instantly scan through the sections to get the information they need.

So, make sure your content is scannable and easy-to-follow.

1. Divide your manual into different sections with headings and subheadings.
2. Use lists for the steps.
3. Use visual elements or building blocks to highlight important information.
4. If your guide is very long, include a table of contents.

A great way to maintain a similar structure across all of your manuals is to create a collection of templates (for example knowledge base article templates).

Your templates must be straightforward, have a smooth flow, and contain the necessary elements required for every type of manual. For example, a template can comprise of:

• Room for an opening paragraph
• Headings and subheadings
• A series of actions in the correct order
• Cautions and alerts
• Placeholder for final thoughts

For online instruction manuals, here’s the template that we usually use and recommend.

How To Host Instruction Manuals Online

Hosting instruction manuals online will help customers easily find them.

And you can further enhance it by adding a search bar, collecting real-time feedback, SEO optimization, and at the same time you can upsell other products as well.

We are in 2025, creating and managing websites is a child’s play now. And that is what this section is all about.

1. Create a WordPress Website

It is recommended to create a WordPress website or use any other content management system (CMS) for your self-help channel.

It will make your job of managing content/website much easier.

We recommend Kinsta, as they offer very reliable managed WordPress services (and we also use it ourselves).

Purchase a plan that fits your needs, follow the process, and once you are in their dashboard, from there you can create a WordPress site.

2. Create a Portal for Manuals

With WordPress you can start publishing your content right away, but it’s highly recommended to use a knowledge base/documentation plugin.

It will give you tons of options. Such as:

1. Design freedom with premade blocks, elements and customization options
2. Improved search bar
3. User access control
4. Better search engine optimization
5. Feedback system
6. Reports and analytics

We recommend Heroic Knowledge Base, which you can purchase here.

Once you have a plugin file ready:

1. Access WordPress Dashboard by adding /wp-admin to the end of your website URL.
2. Click on the Plugins → Add New Plugin.
3. Click on the Upload Plugin button.
4. Choose a downloaded plugin file.
5. Click the Install Now button.
6. After installation, Activate the plugin.

Follow the setup wizard to import the demo site and settings. You can access the setup wizard from the plugins section If you missed it during the installation process.

Your manuals portal is ready and can be accessed from the front end at yourdomain.com/knowledge-base/.

3. Publish Your Instruction Manuals

Now that you have a Heroic KB plugin installed, you can start publishing your manuals.

You can add manuals from WordPress Dashboard → Heroic KB → Add New Article.

WordPress comes with a rich page editor (known as block editor) through which you can create amazing layouts and pages.

Plus, you get the added blocks from the Heroic KB plugin. Such as table of contents, FAQs, and blocks for highlighting important stuff.

Once done, click on the Save button to publish your content.

By default your guides will look great on the front end, which you can customize based on your liking or brand style.

4. Customizing Your Portal Design

As I said, with Heroic KB you get tons of options to customize your manuals portal.

Customization settings can be managed from WordPress → Heroic KB → Settings.

You get customization options such as:

1. Color settings to change color of your portal
2. Option to change default slug of portal (from knowledge-base to anything you want)
3. Sidebar settings for layout management
4. Page options to manage breadcrumbs, feedback system
5. Restrict access to make internal portal or hide specific content behind login

Plus, you can also install a Know All theme to get more customization options such as typography, and layouts, which comes for free with Heroic KB purchase and I highly recommend installing it.

5. Make It SEO/Search Friendly

I mentioned a lot about SEO (search engine optimization) in this guide. It’s not as complicated as it sounds.

If you are using WordPress and systems like Heroic KB, you have to just spend a few minutes to install an SEO plugin such as All in One SEO or Yoast SEO.

SEO is hard and competitive for ranking generic terms (for example, ‘how to build a furniture’), but for brand related terms you get a free pass (for example, ‘how to build IKEA1250 table’).

Other than installing SEO plugin, here are some steps you can take to make your instructional manuals searchable and easy to navigate:

Use descriptive titles rather than standard headings – Detailed headings provide users the primary concept of a section, allowing them to discover the information they need.

Provide a search box – To ensure it’s easy to look up the material your users need, you should preferably present it with a readily accessible search box. It should also be able to guess the right articles based on the words your visitors are entering and look through the headings as well as the text of your manuals.

Include a table of contents – If your user manual is lengthy or has a lot of content, the significance of adding a table of contents goes up drastically. It allows users to find and reach a specific section promptly.

Heroic KB creates an automatic table of contents using the headings of your user guide.

Not just that. Its robust search functionality enables you to look for solutions to your problems effortlessly. And the search bar quickly shows matching articles while the users input a query.

6. Performance Monitor and Management

After creating your user guides, it is important to try out if it’s effective for customers who have no prior experience with your product.

To do this, try assessing the user guide with first-time customers and see how they use the guide for the product.

Write down the areas in your instruction manual where readers encounter difficulties and make changes based on their feedback. Your user guide should enable readers to use it without additional assistance.

If it’s not feasible, Heroic KB provides a built-in system to monitor different metrics.

Think about this: What if you could monitor how long users stayed on the instruction manuals, the number of times they were read, and whether they were even seen even once?

This will allow you to determine if customers have really viewed the provided support content.

Heroic KB lets you monitor your guides’ engagement and provides incredible data that you can use to improve your manuals.

Apart from getting insights from the engagement data of your instruction manuals, getting direct feedback from customers is also vital.

Heroic KB also allows you to gather visitor feedback.

Users can upvote and downvote a manual and mention their reasons for doing so. And this lets you effectively improve your user manuals.

Instruction Manual Examples and What To Learn From Them

Improve the look and feel of your instruction manuals by customizing various aspects such as their structure, typography, colors, and brand elements.

For instance, take a look at this Elvie user guide which is attractive to view because it contains elegant typefaces, soothing colors, and modern graphics.

Along with the placement of the visuals, you should think about the look and feel of your document.

The type of structure, sequence of material, text size, font family, colors, and headers determine the overall appearance of your manual. These components should make it visually appealing for the readers.

Heroic KB for example, lets you make instruction guides that are stunning to begin with. Its information hub provides an advanced look and feel that gives a polished appearance to your manuals.

And if you want to align your manuals with your company’s brand personality, there are multiple settings in Heroic KB that let you do that.

We already covered a few more examples throughout the tutorial, from IKEAs image heavy tutorials to writing directions in active voice.

Frequently Asked Questions About Instruction Manuals

Here are the answers to some common questions related to instruction manuals.

What information should be in an instruction manual?

Instruction manuals typically include step-by-step instructions, diagrams, and illustrations to explain how to assemble, operate, or maintain the product. They may also include safety precautions, troubleshooting tips, and warranty information.

What formats does an instruction manual have?

Instruction manuals can come in various formats, depending on the type of product and the intended audience. Here are some common formats:

• Printed manuals: These are physical documents that come with the product, usually in the form of a booklet.
• PDF manuals: These are digital versions of printed manuals that can be downloaded from the manufacturer’s website. (our guide to embedding PDFs in WordPress website)
• Online manuals: These are manuals that are hosted on the manufacturer’s website and can be accessed through a web browser.
• Mobile apps: Some products come with a companion app that includes instruction manuals, tutorials, and other helpful resources.

Summing Up: Get Started With Instruction Manuals

As you can see, an instructional manual is an indispensable part of your customer support. It plays a significant role in letting users make sense of your product or service.

While it may take some time and effort to write a proper instruction manual, the outcome is well worth it. And you should also put some effort into making it easier for customers to search them.

That’s where a combination of WordPress and Heroic KB can really help you speed things up. With Heroic KB, you can not only create beautiful and professional user guides out of the box, but also gather user feedback and engagement data to improve them.

Overall, delivering relevant and useful instruction manuals will lead to happy customers who will stick with your brand in the long run.

Mentioned Resources in This Tutorial

1. Online self-service support portal expectation case study by Statista ↩︎
2. Customer Onboarding Statistics ↩︎
3. Video Statistics for Trainers and Educators by TechSmith ↩︎