I read Teija Salomaa‘s thesis about the readability of documentation. This thesis, from the field of translation studies, is from 2004, so it is unfortunately not available on the Internet. Salomaa sought to find out how different people read instructions and how they make use of them. The subjects of the study believe that good instructions proceed in a logical order and correspond to the way people use the equipment or process. Other important features are brevity and consistent terminology. The subjects found multilingual instructions troublesome when the Finnish version is buried among the other languages. On the basis of usability testing, the best instructions are generated through an iterative documentation process and developed in collaboration with the target audience. When composing instructions, it is good to keep in mind that subjects do not usually read the entire text; rather, they will pick up individual sections here and there to solve the problems they’re facing. It’s critical that instructions are searchable and easily scanned. For example, in a task regarding a sphygmomanometer, one subject simply started operating the device and turned to the instructions only when problems arose – this way he succeeded in completing the task more quickly than others.