Abstract

Maintenance in production environments is becoming increasingly complex as machines become more technologically advanced and need less maintenance. As a result, maintenance personnel face more difficult tasks. At the same time the maintenance engineers obtain less experience with the tasks. In this context, online multimedia manuals are thought to give better support for searching information and expressing complex interactions with physical objects than paper manuals. Three prototypes were designed and formative evaluated in an industrial environment. The evaluation of the first prototype showed that maintenance engineers encountered serious problems with the online multimedia manual, as they omitted crucial steps in the task. The second prototype addressed this problem. The third prototype addressed a problem observed in the second prototype when subjects switched between the online manual and the machine controls.