Jay Marcyes

Interesting post and comment discussion about how users don't read any help information. I've noticed this quite a bit on Noopsi. People just don't read anything. That's why you have to constantly strive to streamline your application and make it intuitive to use without the user reading any sort of "manual" on how it works.

The big takeaway:

When you make features easy to use, you are rewarding user behavior you like. You are guiding users through your application, giving them a clear and obvious path of least resistance. And when you intentionally choose not to make a feature easy to use, you are effectively ignoring user behavior you don't like. You are indirectly discouraging users from utilizing those features...

...If you aren't taking advantage of both techniques in your user interface -- rewarding with simplicity, and (judiciously) ignoring with complexity where necessary -- you aren't properly training your users.

Full book in html by Joel Spolsky. Pretty interesting though seems dated.