Lance Mannion has a great post on product design and manuals. The gist is this: the reason you can’t understand the product manual is that it is trying to explain something that is overly complex, and therefore as hard to describe as it is to do.
I found this to be the case in my manual writing for things like Novell Evolution: when I had a hard time explaining something, it was often because the process itself was too complex. Fortunately, I had access to the developers and I could file bug reports (“This dialog box is totally insane”) that people actually listened to.
I guess I’ve been lucky.
Secretly Ironic 