The evaluation of text editors: methodology and empirical results.
Communications of the ACM
Cursor movement during text editing
ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS)
Writing better computer user documentation: from paper to online
Writing better computer user documentation: from paper to online
Extending the capabilities of word processing software through Horn clause lexical databases
AFIPS Conference Proceedings; vol. 55 1986 National Computer Conference
Automatic text processing
An introduction to text processing
An introduction to text processing
Interactive Editing Systems: Part I
ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
DOCUMENTS: an interactive online solution to four documentation problems
Communications of the ACM
How to Write a Usable User Manual
How to Write a Usable User Manual
The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction
The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction
How do people really use text editors?
Proceedings of the SIGOA conference on Office information systems
Using task analysis in documentation field research
SIGDOC '91 Proceedings of the 9th annual international conference on Systems documentation
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Although the quality of documentation of office automation software has increased significantly in the past few years, current offerings are not without problems. Those difficulties which have to do with the design and organization of the documentation are addressed in this paper.To illustrate, consider the following situations: 1) the command and control information which is commonly needed is either omitted or hard to find on the 'command card' or 'keyboard template' provided by the vendor, 2) the command or control information which we intuitively feel should be discussed in one section of the manual is actually located in an unrelated section, 3) the manual's table of contents does not seem to correspond well with the functional characteristics of the product, 4) the most appropriate command is not to be found in the manual's index, and 5) the 'help' facility frequently wastes rather than conserves time by providing the user with inappropriate alternatives. We maintain that these sorts of obstructions arise in many cases because insufficient attention has been given to an common sensical and intuitive analysis of the product's functionality as well as empirical use studies. We describe how these difficulties may be overcome by appeal to research results reported in the literature. Word processing software will be used to illustrate the technique.