BibTex
@inproceedings{Black:1987:10.1145/29933.275623,
author = {Black, John and Carroll, John and McGuigan, Stuart},
title = {What kind of minimal instruction manual is the most effective},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the SIGCHI/GI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems and Graphics Interface},
series = {GI + CHI 1987},
year = {1987},
issn = {0713-5425},
isbn = {0-89791-213-6},
location = {Toronto, Ontario, Canada},
pages = {159--162},
numpages = {4},
doi = {10.1145/29933.275623},
acmdoi = {10.1145/29933.275623},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
}
Abstract
An empirical study examined the effectiveness of four different versions of a self-instruction manual for a word processing system: a Skeletal version that explicitly states only the essential information, an Inferential version that has the users infer some of the essential information, a Rehearsal version that is like the Skeletal manual, but adds opportunities to rehearse the explicitly stated information, and a Lengthy version that adds nonessential explanatory and descriptive information to the Skeletal version. The best learning performance was obtained with the inferential approach, particularly for more realistic tasks.