Designing Minimal Computer Manuals from Scratch

We designed from scratch a minimal manual of the kind proposed by Carroll (1990) for Unix e-mail. The design process involved acquiring from a set of experts information about e-mail use that would be helpful to novices, and acquiring from novices information that guided subsequent versions of the manual. The seventh version of the minimal manual was tested against a commercial manual, in a comparative performance experiment, with 30 naive subjects. It had approximately 13% of the pages of the commercial manual; it resulted in 30% faster learning and more effective use of the e-mail system overall, and significantly better performance on individual subtasks; including the recovery from errors. Significantly more users were satisfied with it than with the conventional manual. Carroll's general principles of manual design for minimal manuals were found to be a good basis for design, and we suggest these guidelines are suitable for the design of such manuals from scratch.