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Designing Usable Documentation: New Directions for Human Factors

The Human Factors community has virtually ignored one of the most important components of the extended user interface, user documentation. Last year at the 34th Annual Meeting in Orlando there was only one paper on either the design or use of documentation. By comparison, there were approximately a hundred papers related to screen design for video display terminals. The same disparity shows up in the Human Factors Journal. Last year there were no papers on documentation and eleven on accessing information from video display terminals. This lack of research in the human factors of documentation is surprising for several reasons: First, documentation is ubiquitous and it is big business. Just about every software package and every piece of hardware comes with its own manual today. Second, the importance of documentation to the usability of a product is not a secret. Alphonse Chapanis, in his presidential address delivered at the Eighth Annual Meeting of the Human Factors Society, told the audience “A very large and important area of human factors engineering [has been] almost entirely neglected. This area consists of the language and the words that are attached to the tools, machines, systems, and operations with which we are concerned.” Third, there is no shortage of interesting applied research questions in this area. To name a few: — When and why do users turn to a manual? — Does format affect perceived usability? How? — How do people access information in a document? How can that access be made easier? — How do technical writers create technical instructions? — How can documentation be better integrated with online help and error support systems? Although all the participants on the panel have been actively studying the use of documentation, the focus of the panel will not be a recounting of past research. Rather the panelists will offer us direction, based on their extensive experience, for the next decade and beyond. Where are we going? What do we need to know so that we can build a science of documentation? Why have so many human factors practitioners shied away from documentation? How can we make significant improvements to the usability of documents? What form will the documentation of the year 2000 take, and how can human factors contribute to its usability?