Taking part in a workshop on figuring out ways of working in a new team, I was introduced to the Personal User Manual. I was immediately fascinated and amazed at how I hadn’t come across this tool before, and couldn’t wait to put it into practice.

What is a Personal User Manual?

A Personal User Manual is a document that helps you to communicate how you work best, and who you are as a human being. It gives those you will be working with an idea of who you are, and how they can best interact with you.

It is made up of a number of categories that are designed to surface your expertise, things you want to learn, how you like to give and receive support, signals about how you might be feeling, how things you do have been misinterpreted in the past, and what core values drive you - not only in your role at work - but as a person.

Why create a Personal User Manual?

In the past I’ve often found that it’s difficult to form relationships with a team of people you work with, at least not without having worked with them over a decent period - and I’m talking months rather than weeks. It takes me a fair amount of time to understand how others work, and how to adjust the ways I communicate and interact to create a better working environment.

Typically I would learn these better ways over time. It would happen organically through constant interactions, meetings, video calls, and asynchronous messaging, but would be down to my ability to perceive patterns, nuances, and social cues to form an understanding of how I can improve what I do to make the way we work easier.

The Personal User Manual is a shortcut to this understanding. It removes the need for others to figure out your quirks, what annoys you, how others can interpret your meaning in ways that were not intended, what you’re good at and what you’re not so good at, and allows you to communicate all of this and more in your own words.

How to use Personal User Manuals

Since being introduced to the Personal User Manual I’ve done a bit of research on how they are used by different people and organisations, and it also became apparent that they were used for different reasons.

The setting for my first experience in creating my own Personal User Manual was with a fellow designer and our senior stakeholder. As designers, we would be working to deliver various services/products/features with the aim of fulfilling the goals and vision of our senior stakeholder. With that in mind, the session was just an hour long to establish some ground rules and ways of working together, and the personal user manual was for us to spend a few minutes filling out a template, but we ended up just talking through it all and having a more natural flowing conversation.

As with any of these kinds of tools they are a framework, not a set of hard and fast rules that absolutely must be followed. For us, the whole point was to understand how we like to work, and how we can make sure that we do our work in a way that we can all agree on that would be conducive for us to reach our shared goals.

Instead of spending weeks, months, or perhaps even years trying to understand how you can work better with the people around you, you can use a framework like Personal User Manuals and cut to the chase by just asking!

Making your Personal User Manual

Our Personal User Manual templates were set up as 8 questions:

  • Things I’m good at - the skills and experience I bring to the project
  • Things I might need help with - the skills and experience I want to develop
  • What I like help to look like - how I like to be given support or taught things
  • My key values - what I find important for myself and others
  • How I respond under stress - how I react when I'm feeling stressed
  • How I like to communicate - how I like to be briefed, given feedback, asked questions etc.
  • How I can be misunderstood - how my actions or behaviour might be misinterpreted
  • Other things to know about me - anything else?

Ideally, you would provide this kind of outline prior to the workshop so that anyone who likes to give this kind of thing quite a bit of thought - people like me! - then you’re providing that window of opportunity so as to avoid any awkward silences or gaps where people can’t articulate their thoughts on the spot in front of others.

We had this template laid out on a shared Miro board that looked a bit like this:

Example layout for a Personal User Manual

This way we were able to easily duplicate the board for however many people would be involved in the session, with more than enough space for each person to make their notes under each section.

Personal User Manuals aren’t just for creating a shared understanding

One of the things I liked most about this tool is that it wouldn’t just benefit the people I work with, it would also be a method through which I could question myself.

As a designer, I have a fairly good understanding of what my values are, and since I’m adhering to them as much as I possibly can while I’m working, I’m very well-versed and understand those motivations of mine very deeply.

But the most eye-opening categories for me were “How I respond under stress” and “How I can be misunderstood”. I really spent some time thinking through what I could put under these categories, and had to really examine my behaviours on recent projects to gain a better understanding of myself so that I could then convey that to others to help them understand me.

Even if you don’t use this tool as a way to improve your understanding of the people you work with, and give them a better understanding of you, I urge you to spend just 15 to 30 minutes to answer these questions for yourself. You might just discover something that helps both you and your colleagues in understanding how you function as a human being.