CHI '91 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Too much of a good thing?: identifying and resolving bloat in the user interface
ACM SIGCHI Bulletin
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
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
Human-Computer Interaction
Proceedings of the 26th 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 macro-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
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
The midwife's assistant: designing integrated learning tools to scaffold ultrasound practice
Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development
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To see whether, from the user's standpoint, muddling through with trial-and-error exploration of the interface actually works as well as consulting help, we analyzed video recordings of 14 subjects using Microsoft Publisher. We segmented their attempts at accomplishing four tasks into episodes, lasting from a few seconds to a few minutes, using four problem-solving approaches: help, recall, and trial-and-error. The subjects' overall rates of success with trial-and-error were higher than with help. We present trends of use of the approaches across the four tasks, review the apparent causes of success and failure when using the approaches, and develop an affordance-knowledge model that helps to explain people's preference for muddling through over using help. We conclude by discussing the model's implications for developers of systems and writers of help.