Automation makes user intervention difficult or impossible. Industrial anthropologist Larry Hirshhorn, for example, recounts the experiences of a group of machinists who taught themselves how to program an automated lathe and, as a result, began improving the parts made by the machines (rather than, as the machinists had previously done, merely load material into the machine and remove parts after they were made). Management, however, viewed the workers as operating in areas outside of their qualifications, and inserted a mechanism on the machine to prevent the machinists from reprogramming it.
Similar structures are often present in documentation, typically because of the argument that conceptual information or elaborations are "extraneous." The resume wizard I showed earlier, for example, offers a minimal number of choices to users but in no way encourages them to expand on those choices, or rework them in new ways. The wizard does offer limited advice on when to use chronological rather than skills based organizations, but it does not offer any discussion beyond that. But why limit it to five words? Why not connect those fragmented, telegraphic bits of information to extended information? Why not, in fact, connect the five-word descriptions to full-blown lessons on page design or writing processes, or whatever? Because the priorities of online help-compact efficiently functioning-prevent such important things as offering the user any choice that cannot be addressed without thought. Online help addressing complicated design issues such as the appropriate use of hanging indents, kerning, leading, etc. must necessarily (according to the efficiency model) only offer functional instructions. The technology disguises itself as a neutral tool rather than an incomplete environment, at never suggesting that the user might want to think about the operation or learn background theories. The implication behind online help in most computer programs is that the user already knows the theory behind the work, and that the computer is only a tool.
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