A path or a map?

My digital multifunction wristwatch is representative of a class of modern information machines. It has 51 functions controlled by four buttons, but the internal operations of the watch and the pattern of button-presses are obscure to the user. Providing useful instruction for the operation of such machines is notoriously difficult. Standard instructional design (ID) prescriptions for teaching procedures are not very helpful. ID typically conceives of procedures as a single string of events, i.e., a path. The watch interface is not a single procedure, but a collection of parallel procedures, each of which is minimally different from the others. This collection of procedures constitutes a tiny domain that could potentially be mapped. By mapping we refer to a representation at a more abstract level that enables multiple paths. A task-action grammar was written to represent the domain at an abstract level. A simulator was used to test hypotheses about different approaches to writing instruction for digital machines. Results indicated that instructional information at the map level produced more transfer to uninstructed tasks without sacrificing time.