In one of my first presentations about job aids, I showed this picture.
“Job” is a bit much, but I argued that there was clearly a task being aided. You don’t have to remember what kind of battery goes into this mouse, nor do you have to remember which way the battery should go.
You do need to recognize that the mouse isn’t working because the battery is dead, and you do need to know how to get the cover off, but those conditions are met by a great many people who’ll run into the “what kind / which way” situation.
This past week, I had to rent a pickup truck to haul some construction material. The last time I rented a truck was at least 15 years ago, so many parts of the process were unfamiliar to me.
I knew I needed to find out about refueling the truck. The clerk at the rental business said the tank was half full, and that’s where it should be when I returned the truck. Then he pointed out a diagram on the rental agreement; it’s the bottom section of this closeup:
I’ve never in my life seen on a vehicle rental agreement anything to give me a hint of how much fuel I might need (in liters or in gallons) to get the vehicle up to the required amount. I don’t know how common this is in the truck-rental world, because I’ve rented two in the past 16 years.
Almost always when I’ve rented cars, the agency wants them returned with a full tank, so estimating isn’t much of an issue. But the task here was to bring the truck back half-full. Thanks to this little job aid, I could tell that at 3/8ths of a tank, I needed something like 12 liters.
I ended up at a pay-before-you-pump station. A little guesstimating told me I needed about twenty dollars’ worth, which seemed simpler than asking for a dozen liters. When I started the truck to head off, the tank was just slightly more than half full.
A successful accomplishment, thanks to a little help from a little job aid.