A user manual may provide instructions that, if the user follows them, achieve any of certain objectives as determined by the manual designers. A manual may therefore be viewed rather like a computer program, as pre-planned instructions. Accordingly, software engineering and its methods may be applied mutatis mutandis to the manual and its design process.We consider structured programming methods, and show that some difficulties with user interfaces may be attributed to manuals being 'unstructured.' Since there are many programming metrics, and very many styles of manuals for user interfaces, this paper is concerned with justifying the approach and showing how insightful it is.
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