Influence Factors on User Manual Engagement in the Context of Smart Wearable Devices

The emergence of smart wearable devices has gradually introduced a vast array of functions that may greatly serve the everyday needs of users. Although their ever-increasing list of capabilities may be compensated for by intuitive design, users may still have numerous reasons to engage with their user manuals. In this paper, we present four research efforts on the user manuals of smart wearable devices. Our work tackles various influence factors, investigates user behavior, and studies how the device itself affects user manual engagement, as well as the other way around. The research efforts address user experience and behavior, personal preference, device attributes, and the performance metrics of user manuals. We specifically studied smartwatches and smart bands, and explored engagement with medical-purpose smart wearables and their user manuals. As a novelty of our contribution, we classify test participants as regular users, professional users, and technical writers, based on their connection to user manuals, and separately analyze their responses to our questionnaire-based research efforts. The obtained results indicate that user experience and device complexity as influence factors have a statistically significant impact on user manual engagement for regular users, and highlight how regular users and technical writers differ in preference and search-related tasks.