PRINCIPLES FOR THE DESIGN OF MANUALS : AN EMPIRICAL STUDY AND PRODUCTION RUL E ANALYSI S RICHARD CATRAMBON E Research on manual design often does not speak to th e needs of manual writers . One reason for this state of affairs is that researchers typically do not explain why a principle works or how to implement it in variou s contexts . They do not provide a cognitive model to justify the principles . A model of how people acquire procedural skills would enable writers to appl y documentation principles more effectively in a variety of contexts. Unfortunately, research that could provide usefu l models tends not to use realistic tasks . Thus, it is no t clear that the tested principles would work for a rea l manual . The goal of the proposed research is to us e realistic tasks to examine individual principles for manua l design . In addition, a production rule formalism based o n a model of the user's cognition will be used to generate predictions about the success of the documentation produced according to various principles . An example of such a prediction would be : instructions which translate to
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