In the early 1980s, our group at the IBM Watson Research Center investigated the difficulties people experienced getting started with personal computers. In these studies, we provided all required software, hardware, and documentation, and then watched quietly. Our observations illustrated how people did not, and perhaps could not, make effective use of what appeared to be carefully designed documentation and self-instruction material. As part of this project, we carried out a study of the Apple Lisa, one of the first systems to incorporate a graphical user interface, an interactive tutorial, and an extensive library of manuals specifically designed for end users.

One of our volunteer users turned out to be a linguist working as a documentation developer. He was fairly knowledgeable about the state of the art in documentation, and was quite impressed with the Lisa manuals and interactive tutorial. He declared to us at the outset of the session, "You're going to be watching a lot of reading. I am the kind of person who reads everything before doing anything." However, within a few minutes, he had discarded the manuals and was improvising with the tutorial exercises, actively exploring the system, and making lots of errors (Carroll & Mazur 1986).