Communications of the ACM - Special issue on computer graphics: state of the arts
Measuring usability: are effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction really correlated?
Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
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
Automatic documentation inference for exceptions
ISSTA '08 Proceedings of the 2008 international symposium on Software testing and analysis
Proceedings of the 26th annual ACM international conference on Design of communication
Using customer input to drive change in user assistance
Proceedings of the 26th annual ACM international conference on Design of communication
Experience in remote user-centered design
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
Semantic transparency in user assistance systems
Proceedings of the 27th ACM international conference on Design of communication
Modeling task experience in user assistance systems
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
Automatically documenting program changes
Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM international conference on Automated software engineering
Towards automatically generating summary comments for Java methods
Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM international conference on Automated software engineering
Towards user assistance for documents via interactional semantic technology
KI'10 Proceedings of the 33rd annual German conference on Advances in artificial intelligence
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
A human study of patch maintainability
Proceedings of the 2012 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis
Synthesizing API usage examples
Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Software Engineering
API documentation and software community values: a survey of open-source API documentation
Proceedings of the 31st ACM international conference on Design of communication
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While earlier work provided a partial view of users' preferences about manuals, for most users in most work contexts the important question remains open: What do users want in documentation? This paper presents the results of a study in which a diverse cross-section of 25 users was interviewed in depth about their needs and preferences with respect to software help systems, whether printed or on-line, that they use at work. The study's participants indicated that they preferred documentation, whether online or printed, that is easy to navigate, provides explanations at an appropriate level of technical detail, enables finding as well as solving problems through examples and scenarios, and is complete and correct. These preferences give rise to difficult issues, including a possibly inherent tension between coverage and precision, and variation among users with respect to desired level of technical complexity of explanation