The Nurnberg funnel: designing minimalist instruction for practical computer skill
The Nurnberg funnel: designing minimalist instruction for practical computer skill
Assessing agreement on classification tasks: the kappa statistic
Computational Linguistics
Customers' use of documentation: the enduring legacy of print
Proceedings of the 16th annual international conference on Computer documentation
Reducing the gap between what users know and what they need to know
CUU '00 Proceedings on the 2000 conference on Universal Usability
Proceedings of the 23rd annual international conference on Design of communication: documenting & designing for pervasive information
Why don't people read the manual?
SIGDOC '06 Proceedings of the 24th annual ACM international conference on Design of communication
What users say they want in documentation
SIGDOC '06 Proceedings of the 24th annual ACM international conference on Design of communication
Toward a more accurate view of when and how people seek help with computer applications
SIGDOC '07 Proceedings of the 25th annual ACM international conference on Design of communication
Expressing help at appropriate levels
Proceedings of the 26th annual ACM international conference on Design of communication
The micro-structure of use of help
Proceedings of the 27th ACM international conference on Design of communication
The macro-structure of use of help
Proceedings of the 27th ACM international conference on Design of communication
Providing assistance to older users of dynamic Web content
Computers in Human Behavior
Usage of and satisfaction with online help vs. search engines for aid in software use
Proceedings of the 29th ACM international conference on Design of communication
Short-term methodology for long-term usability
Proceedings of the 30th ACM international conference on Design of communication
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The consensus of the documentation literature is that users rarely use help, usually preferring to muddle through. To increase use of help, tutorials for novice users could be changed from guided presentations toward using the system's actual help system. To determine whether this approach would increase users' use of help when they encountered problems with an application, we developed an alternative, help-based tutorial introduction to Microsoft Publisher. We compared the behaviors of users introduced to Publisher with the help-based tutorial with the behaviors of users who learned from a traditional tutorial. A balanced study of 22 novice users of Publisher suggests that using a help-based tutorial leads to significantly greater use of help systems when users encounter problems. However, the data also suggest that the increased use of help may not lead to more effective task performance.