ASSESSMENT OF THE MINIMALIST APPROACH TO COMPUTER USER DOCUMENTATION

The minimalist approach (Carroll, 1990a) advocates the development-of a radically different type of manual when compared to a conventional o ne. For example, the manual should proceed almost directly to procedur al skills development rather than building a conceptual model first. I t ought to focus on authentic tasks practised in context, as opposed t o mock exercises and isolated practice. In addition, it should stimula te users to exploit their knowledge and thinking, as opposed to imposi ng the writer's view and discussing everything that users should see o r know. In the first part of the paper the construction of a tutorial based on the minimalist principles is described. A parallel is drawn w ith constructivism with which minimalism shares important notions of i nstruction. In the second part, an experiment is described in which th e minimal manual was tested against a conventional one. The outcome fa voured the new manual. For example, minimal manual users completed abo ut 50% more tasks successfully on a performance test and displayed sig nificantly more self-reliance (e.g. more self-initiated error-recoveri es, and fewer manual consultations).