A Proper Explanation When You Need One.
Harold Thimbleby, Peter Bernard Ladkin · 1995
Quality program design has received considerable attention from the software engineering community. Quality user manual design has received considerable attention from the human computer interaction community. Yet manuals and systems are often independently conceived, and thus do not well complement each other. This paper shows one method of easily obtaining correct and complete user manuals guaranteed to correspond with the system they document. The method has considerable merit for improving interactive systems design. Keywords: User manuals. Interactive systems programming. Iterative design. Safety. 1 Introduction We illustrate our approach by means of an example. We take a contemporary interactive system, a domestic fax/answerphone machine, which we have reverse engineered to a functional specification; we show how to derive a quality user manual from this `raw' specification. The primary property of our approach is that the manual is guaranteed to be complete. (Inevitably, there...