The retreat from usability: user documentation in the post-usability era

ABSTRACT

During the 1980s, developers and documentors collaborated on a joint mission: to make applications (and their manuals) as usable as possible: easy-to-learn, easy-to-operate, and therefore more useful. In recent years, however, developers have substantially retreated from this protective approach to users, placing a greater emphasis on flexibility, feature-richness, and customizability, none of which is consistent with the traditional, technical communicator's model of usability. New conceptions of software, and new expectations about users, may result in a "post-usability era," in which documentors will probably need to moderate their traditional rhetorical and pedagogical roles as protectors of users and advocates for the primacy of ease-of-use.

REFERENCES

• 1: 1. Paul Booth, An Introduction to Human-Computer Interaction, London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1989 Jeffrey Rubin, Handbook of Usability Testing, New York: Wiley & Sons, 1994.
• 2: D. Leonard , A. L. Waller, Usability planning for end-user training, Proceedings of the 7th annual international conference on Systems documentation, p.137-142, November 08-10, 1989, Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, United States [doi>10.1145/74311.74331]
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• 4: 4. Trial-and-error, with rapid feedback, is the basis of much minimalist documentation and training. See J. M. Carroll, The Nurnberg Funnel: Designing Minimalist Instruction for Practical Computer Skill, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1990.
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• 6: 6. In private conversation, Sandra Pakin, editor of the Journal of Documentation Project Management, has expressed to me the opinion that the documentation profession has become excessively concerned with the needs of novice users, who, she points out, are usually a minority of those to be served. At another time, Joseph Chapline, author of one of the first users' manuals (for the BINAC) and recent winner of the ACM SIGDOC Rigo award, has expressed the concern that too marry manuals are written for the "ultrafeeble" user, at the expense of the more typical user.
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• 14: 14. Clinging to "task-oriented" as a term of approval, but recommending something rather different, an anonymous referee for this paper writes (November 1994).
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• 17: 17. This conception of the "agent" appears in Marvin Minsky's The Society of Mind (New York: Sinmn and Schuster, 1985); an agent is any part or process of the mind that by itself is simple enough to understand- even though the interactions among groups of such agents may produce phenomena that are much harder to understand. (p. 326).
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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.7 Distribution, Maintenance, and Enhancement
          Subjects: Documentation

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.1 MODELS AND PRINCIPLES
      H.1.2 User/Machine Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: Training, help, and documentation

General Terms:
Design, Documentation, Human Factors, Performance