How some advice fails

Video data for thirty-four cases of advice seeking, giving and following behavior at a graphical computer interface were analyzed in detail. The evidence indicated that clients followed prescriptive advice effectively and efficiently in slightly more than half the cases. For other cases, clients performed twice as many actions as needed in three times as much time and never reached prescribed states. A hypothesis that observed advice following difficulties were correlated with advice abstractness was not supported. Rather, it seems advice did not match well with clients' knowledge of the system in particular isolated details.