In some industries, it’s standard practice to disclose the suggested retail price, and then show how much money you’re saving. Cars are probably the best example, with only a small number of cars ever selling at (or above) MSRP. I’ve seen this with groceries, too. In fact, some stores just use the price that’s printed on the package, rather than affixing a separate price tag.

Here’s where it gets strange. Due to market conditions in certain areas, the selling price may actually be higher than what the package says. I saw this with some Kraft products: the package said $2.99, but the price tag said $4.50. This is confusing to the buyer, as we’ve been trained to expect things to sell for list price or less.

I have no idea what sort of sales increase you get by printing a suggested price on the package, nor how this is affected by cases where the selling price is higher than list. All else equal, it’s usually best to avoid pricing practices that confuse or deceive customers. This is especially true for low-cost products that rely on repeat purchases to achieve optimal profits.

With this in mind, I would recommend that brands start by identifying those products that sell for more than list price in some markets. Then, they should consider offering an alternate package design for that market, without any list pricing shown. This would reduce confusion, build trust, and probably increase sales in the affected markets.

I looked over the user’s guide from a flat-screen TV yesterday. Aside from the usual problems with poor grammar and warnings against putting the TV in your bathtub, I noticed something else: they wasted a huge amount of space on the obvious. And I mean, really obvious. In fact, they dedicated two entire pages to the channel and volume buttons on the remote control. As in, how to change the channel and raise and lower the volume. And I’m sure I could find other examples of this flawed approach, since the instructions for a lot of electronics seem to come from the same mold.

Dedicating page after page to incredibly basic functions is a waste of space. It insults all but the most inexperienced users, and the people who truly need that sort of hand-holding are unlikely to ever get that far in the manual — if they read it at all. In the guide that I saw, you would have to get past 36 pages of setup instructions and diagrams before learning how to change the channel. How many super-novice users are going to get that far in their search for answers? My guess is not many at all. Meanwhile, people with more complex inquiries get frustrated by all the irrelevant, obvious things they have to pass though in order to find answers.

My advice is to leave the really basic stuff out entirely. When it comes to things like changing the channel, if you stick to the widely-accepted designs that people have been seeing for years, this is probably a safe bet. But if you must include those instructions, put them in a brief section at the beginning with a title like “Never used a TV before? Learn the basics in 60 seconds.” This will help you serve users of all skill levels more effectively. Similarly, if you have lots of pages that cover essentially the same thing, like an explanation of every possible error message, you should consider only covering the most common ones. If your messages are well-written, they should pretty much speak for themselves.

In general, my favorite approach is to organize your user guide in terms of popular tasks that customers want to perform. This is vastly superior to just labeling all the buttons and telling people what each one does. You can even group these tasks by experience level, different uses of the product, etc. Throughout the process, also consider how much effort it’s going to take for a user to find the relevant area. How many pages do they have to bypass to get there, and would someone with this question even open the manual in the first place? With these considerations in mind, you should be able to make shorter and more focused documentation, which ultimately proves more valuable to customers.

My BlackBerry seems to need charging a lot more often lately. Now that I think about it, the original battery is at least two years old, maybe close to three. But aside from the age of the battery, I really have no way of figuring out whether it’s time to replace it. And because I bought a spare battery well after the original one, even looking at the purchase dates wouldn’t clear up the confusion, since the dates say nothing about which battery was used and for how long.

With this in mind, I find it a bit surprising that virtually every rechargeable device provides a status indicator for how much battery life is left on a particular charge, but there’s no information about when the battery needs to be replaced. For batteries that aren’t rechargeable, like those in alarm clocks and VCRs, the idea of a “Replace battery” message seems well accepted. But for more advanced devices that are recharged over and over, the customer is left guessing. Long-term, this hurts the user experience as the battery ages and battery life drops, all the while providing no information to the user about what’s going on.

Most rechargeable batteries are the Lithium-Ion type and have a microprocessor that tells the host device how much charge they have left. So it shouldn’t be all that difficult for the battery to record how many hours (or charges) that it’s been through. When this reaches a certain level, the device could tell you that it’s time to order a new battery, since the battery life is about to decline. Perhaps some devices already work like this, though I’ve never seen one.

For a reasonable reference point, designers of rechargeable products might look to digital projectors, which typically record each hour that the lamp has been used, and remind you to replace it when it gets beyond a certain point. Granted, projectors represent a less complex scenario, since the bulb stays in place until it burns out. There’s no reason for users to swap it with a spare, like they do when using mobile devices. But the takeaway is the same: if a key component is going to wear out over time, the best approach is to give users a heads-up about it. That way, they can take action at the right time, and they’ll be less likely to blame the product itself when things stop working like they’re used to.