Usability planning for end-user training
SIGDOC '89 Proceedings of the 7th annual international conference on Systems documentation
The SGML handbook
Technical communicators' current views on usability and collaboration
SIGDOC '95 Proceedings of the 13th annual international conference on Systems documentation: emerging from chaos: solutions for the growing complexity of our jobs
Consequences of the engineering approach to technical writing
ACM Journal of Computer Documentation (JCD)
The metaphysics of information quality: comments on producing quality technical information
ACM Journal of Computer Documentation (JCD)
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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.