Compliance to owner's manual warnings: influence of familiarity and the placement of a supplemental directive

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Abstract
This research examined several methods of directing people to warnings in an owner's manual in order to increase compliance behaviour during the installation of a computer disk drive. Seven conditions were examined. In the control condition, the disk drive was accompanied by a basic manual that contained equipment-safety warnings on pages 6 and 7. In another condition, the manual was identical except that the warnings were also reprinted redundantly on page 2 of the manual (which was blank in the basic manual). The remaining five conditions were identical to the redundant-warning condition, except that they also included a supplemental directive that was placed at various locations (on the shipping box, cover page of the manual, accompanying leaflet, disk drive cable, and front of the drive). The directive stated 'Please Read Page 2 of the Owner's Manual Before Connecting the Equipment’. The results show a trend of greater compliance with the redundant-warning (only) manual compared to the basic manual, but the difference was not statistically significant. When the supplemental directive was located most proximally to the equipment and required physical interaction with the warning during the task (front-of-drive condition), compliance was significantly greater than the basic and redundant-warning (only) manual conditions. The results also show that, in general, users with less experience connecting electronic equipment complied more frequently with the warnings than users with greater experience. Additional results indicate that less experienced users were not further influenced by the presence and location of the supplemental directive, but highly experienced users complied more often when the supplemental directive was placed in the more proximal locations. The results are discussed in relation to script theory and to previous research on familiarity. The present study suggests that well-placed safety information can be useful in alerting users with varying levels of experience.

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