Contribution of cognitive psychology to the design of procedural instructions

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to show how cognitive psychology can help technical writers to improve the design of procedural instructions. In order to achieve this goal, the first part compares the characteristics of procedural instructions to other kinds of text. The emphasised characteristics of procedural instructions deal with their pragmatic goal, complexity of use (with a user - document - appliance interaction) and efficiency constraints. The second part of the paper reports theoretical considerations and research results concerning human cognitive processes implied in the processing of this specific kind of information, such as reading goals, understanding, action planning, inference making. Based on these characteristics, the third part proposes design solutions which can enhance the quality of procedural instructions, such as "using pictures together with text to help mental model elaboration", "following a use-order principle to improve action planning", "using numbered lists of instructions to facilitate switching activities and reduce cognitive load" and "using headings or pictures to help execute control activities". The paper concludes with the necessity of user-testing to complement these recommendations in order to obtain quality documentation.