skip to main content
10.1145/1166324.1166329acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesdocConference Proceedingsconference-collections
Article

Why don't people read the manual?

Published: 18 October 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Few users of computer applications seek help from the documentation. This paper reports the results of an empirical study of why this is so and examines how, in real work, users solve their usability problems. Based on in-depth interviews with 25 subjects representing a varied cross-section of users, we find that users do avoid using both paper and online help systems. Few users have paper manuals for the most heavily used applications, but none complained about their lack. Online help is more likely to be consulted than paper manuals, but users are equally likely to report that they solve their problem by asking a colleague or experimenting on their own. Users cite difficulties in navigating the help systems, particularly difficulties in finding useful search terms, and disappointment in the level of explanation found.

References

[1]
Baecker, R., Booth, K., Jovicic, S., McGrenere, J. and Moore, G. (2000). Reducing the gap between what users know and what they need to know. Proceedings of the ACM 2000 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, 17--23.
[2]
Bessiere, K., Ceaparu, I., Lazar, J., Robinson, J., and Shneiderman, B. (2003). Social and psychological influences on computer user frustration, CS Technical Report 4410, Department of Computer Science. University of Maryland.
[3]
Beyer, H., and Holtzblatt, K. (1996). Contextual design: Defining customer-centered systems. San Francisco: Morgan-Kaufmann.
[4]
Carroll, J. (1990). The Nurnberg funnel: Designing minimalist instruction for practical computer skill. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
[5]
Carroll, J. (Ed.) (1998). Minimalism beyond the Nurnberg funnel. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
[6]
Ceaparu, I., Lazar, J., Bessiere, K., Robinson, J., and Shneiderman, B. (2004). Determining causes and severity of end-user frustration, International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 17(3), 333--356.
[7]
Hazlett, R. (2003). Measurement of user frustration: a biologic approach, Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2003), 734--735.
[8]
Hilbert, D. (1998). A survey of computer-aided techniques for extracting usability information from user interface events, Technical Report UCI-ICS-98-13, Department of Information and Computer Science, University of California at Irvine, March, 1998.
[9]
Mendoza, V., and Novick, D. (2005). Usability over time, Proceedings of SIGDOC 2005, Coventry, UK, September 21-23, 2005, 151--158.
[10]
Rettig, M. (1991). Nobody reads documentation, Communications of the ACM, 34(7), July 1991, 19--24.
[11]
Smart, K., De Tienne, K., Whitting, M. (1995). Documentation design decisions: Accounting for customer preferences, Proceedings of SIGDOC 95, September-October, 1995, Savannah, GA, 155--156.
[12]
Smart, K., De Tienne, K., Whiting, M. (1998). Customers' use of documentation: The enduring legacy of print, Proceedings of SIGDOC 98, September, 1998, Quebec, Canada, 23--28.
[13]
Smart, K., Whiting, M., and De Tienne, K (2001). Assessing the need for printed and online documentation: A study of customer preference and use, Journal of Business Communication 38(3), 285--314.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Understanding Novice Users' Mental Models of Gesture Discoverability and Designing Effective OnboardingCompanion of the 2024 on ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing10.1145/3675094.3678370(290-295)Online publication date: 5-Oct-2024
  • (2024)Why and When LLM-Based Assistants Can Go Wrong: Investigating the Effectiveness of Prompt-Based Interactions for Software Help-SeekingProceedings of the 29th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces10.1145/3640543.3645200(288-303)Online publication date: 18-Mar-2024
  • (2024)Do I Just Tap My Headset?Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/36314517:4(1-28)Online publication date: 12-Jan-2024
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
SIGDOC '06: Proceedings of the 24th annual ACM international conference on Design of communication
October 2006
224 pages
ISBN:1595935231
DOI:10.1145/1166324
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 18 October 2006

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. manuals
  2. online help
  3. problem-solving
  4. usability

Qualifiers

  • Article

Conference

SIGDOC06
Sponsor:

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 355 of 582 submissions, 61%

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)72
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)3
Reflects downloads up to 18 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Understanding Novice Users' Mental Models of Gesture Discoverability and Designing Effective OnboardingCompanion of the 2024 on ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing10.1145/3675094.3678370(290-295)Online publication date: 5-Oct-2024
  • (2024)Why and When LLM-Based Assistants Can Go Wrong: Investigating the Effectiveness of Prompt-Based Interactions for Software Help-SeekingProceedings of the 29th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces10.1145/3640543.3645200(288-303)Online publication date: 18-Mar-2024
  • (2024)Do I Just Tap My Headset?Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/36314517:4(1-28)Online publication date: 12-Jan-2024
  • (2023)Influence Factors on User Manual Engagement in the Context of Smart Wearable DevicesElectronics10.3390/electronics1217353912:17(3539)Online publication date: 22-Aug-2023
  • (2023)From Discovery to Adoption: Understanding the ML Practitioners’ Interpretability JourneyProceedings of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3563657.3596046(2304-2325)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2023
  • (2023)APIRO: A Framework for Automated Security Tools API RecommendationACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/351276832:1(1-42)Online publication date: 13-Feb-2023
  • (2023)Standardized administration and scoring guidelines for the Spinal Cord Independence Measure Version 3.0 (SCIM-III)Spinal Cord10.1038/s41393-023-00891-561:5(296-306)Online publication date: 25-Mar-2023
  • (2022)Problem-Solving and Tool Use in Office Work: The Potential of Electronic Performance Support Systems to Promote Employee Performance and LearningFrontiers in Psychology10.3389/fpsyg.2022.86942813Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022
  • (2022)Contextual in situ help for visual data interfacesInformation Visualization10.1177/1473871622112006422:1(69-84)Online publication date: 9-Sep-2022
  • (2022)Interfering with the black-box-tradeoff model: Gephisto, a one-click Gephi for critical technical practiceConvergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies10.1177/1354856522112905330:1(142-166)Online publication date: 16-Nov-2022
  • Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media