Users never read the manual because they are impatient to start, and so stay permanently less efficient than the manual would have made them.
Carroll and Rosson described it in 1987 from studies of people learning software. The impatience is rational in the short run, because reading has a certain cost and an uncertain benefit, and expensive in the long run, because the method learned in the first hour is the one kept for years. The design response was to stop writing manuals nobody opens and to put the instruction into the interface.
In practice
- A team works for three years with the process it invented on its first afternoon, until a new colleague points at a menu item that removes half of it.
- A driver keeps a habit learned in the first week of a new car, unaware that the car has a setting for it.
- Standing
- Documented in usability research rather than measured across populations. Compare the competency trap and the illusion of fluency.
- Subject
- Design & Systems
- Essay
- The limits every design runs into