Abstract
During the 1980s, developers and documentors collaborated on a joint mission: to make applications (and their manuals) as usable as possible: easy-to-learn, easy-to-operate, and therefore more useful. In recent years, however, developers have substantially retreated from this protective approach to users, placing a greater emphasis on flexibility, feature-richness, and customizability, none of which is consistent with the traditional, technical communicator's model of usability. New conceptions of software, and new expectations about users, may result in a "post-usability era," in which documentors will probably need to moderate their traditional rhetorical and pedagogical roles as protectors of users and advocates for the primacy of ease-of-use.
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