Introduction 1 Introduction to This Issue Barbara Mirel *JCD New Articles Editor n Life on the Screen, Sherry Turkle contrasts the new complexity of computing in the 1990s to the earlier days of the 1970s and '80s. Unlike those early decades when PCs and software encouraged us to "look under the hood" to learn the mechanisms behind the magic of the operations, computing in the 1990s is opaque. Graphical user interfaces and direct manipulation hide an almost unfathomable complexity, and, in Turkle's terms, we now take things on interface value. i In the 1990s, programs offer greater functionality and flexibility than ever before, and users may stage many possible "plays" with screen-displayed objects, often with more possibilities than they can handle. This situation poses immediate and practical questions for documentation developers and interface designers. How do users learn to tailor their program to their purposes? How do they learn differentlywhen tasks are well-structured and rule-governed and when they are open-ended and contingent? How much conceptual explanation is too much or too little? What designs work best for what purposes-guided exploration, support for trial-and-error, comprehensiveplanning, goal-based cases, scenarios, interactive cognitive maps, balloon help? And finally, what instructional ground have
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Introduction to This Issue
Mirel, Barbara
Follow ACM SIGDOC Asterisk Journal of Computer Documentation
, Volume 21 (1)
Association for Computing Machinery – Feb 15, 1997
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