Creating user manuals for using in collaborative design

Abstract

computer support to guarantee the correctness (and continuing editability) of their documentation. Serious accidents have occurred with very simple manuals done by hand [1]. Our own work has found further flaws in the A320 Flight Crew Operating Manual (FCOM). User manuals are usually written by technical authors after the design of the device has been committed for production. If the manual’s review leads to insight into the design, it is too late. Meanwhile, if the design is modified, the manual may be inaccurate. This paper describes an example language for creating accurate and complete manuals from formal specifications. We show how it can be used to improve part of the Flight Crew Operating Manual for the Airbus A320 fly-by-wire airplane. The technique is easy to implement, can be generalised to other domains, and contributes to concurrent engineering practice—increasing common ground between engineers, users and HCI practitioners. PREVIOUS WORK The work described here builds on earlier efforts: HyperDoc [8] is an interactive device simulator that generates interactive assistance, hypertext manuals, and also supports sophisticated design analysis in Mathematica; Manual Writer [9] is a simple program taking Prolog system specifications and managing the technical authors’ and engineers’ concurrent revision and editing.