A sidebar to the “Apple’s Lisa: A personal Office System” report published in January 1983, pp. 4.

LisaGuide. In order to help someone learn Lisa for the very first time, Apple provides an on-line interactive instructional program called LisaGuide. The initial six LisaGuide lessons take approximately 30 minutes (about 5-6 minutes each), and there are four optional lessons which we recommend most people complete. LisaGuide accomplishes several objectives:

	It presents important ideas about Lisa and the way it works.
	It allows you to demonstrate your newly acquired knowledge by taking specific actions in response to situations posed by LisaGuide. When you take the proper steps, LisaGuide congratulates you with a message while it loads the next exercise. Some people, we might add, adore this interaction while others find it patronizing.
	It allows you to practice certain actions until you are confident that you understand the principles involved!
	It actually demonstrates the actions necessary to perform a given task if you need that extra level of assistance! At the same time, Apple has been careful not to provide too many of these in an effort to make sure that you don’t sit back and just watch them instead of actually practicing actions yourself.
	It allows you to back up to review previous material, or proceed to the next exercise (or lesson) whenever you wish.

It is unusual to find a learning tool of this kind on a system intended for other than the educational market, and Apple is to be congratulated on approaching a very difficult technical problem with such vigor.

LisaGuide exercise. This exercise familiarizes you with using Lisa’s mouse. The idea is to point at the two pictures of apples and dick the button to demonstrate your positioning prowess. Each apple is “eaten” (converted into an apple core) after you select it. Also worth noting are the special Back and Continue buttons at the bottom of the screen, which you select to retreat to the previous or advance to the next exercise in the lesson.

Getting started. Once you understand the basic principles of how to operate Lisa and use its desk-top environment, you are ready to learn how to use the individual office application tools. Sample documents on diskette are provided along with written instructional materials to teach you the basic principles of a given application in about 20-30 minutes. And because you use the materials in conjunction with your Lisa, you can progress at your own pace through whichever “Getting Started” lesson describes the particular application you need to learn.

Tutorial materials. The tutorial materials are very similar to the “Getting Started” materials except that they provide even deeper knowledge about a given subject.

Reference guide materials. For the expert user that needs to know precisely how a certain command or facility works, Apple has created detailed reference guide materials for each application tool. These are organized in a random access manner to facilitate getting a quick answer to a question without wading through extraneous information.

Is Lisa difficult to learn? With this impressive array of instructional and reference materials, one might conclude that Lisa is so difficult to operate that all this is necessary in order to use it. In fact, Lisa is quite easy to learn in spite of its remarkable breadth. You do have to learn a new “culture” – how to operate the mouse, how to execute commands, how you deal with icons, how you manipulate screen windows, how you open and close documents and folders, how you set things aside and pick them up later. It may seem like a lot at first to the uninitiated novice. But it soon becomes very natural. Moreover, once you have learned to think in Lisa terms, the skills you have learned apply to all of the various applications. And, experience with one application transfers remarkably well to other applications.

One of the real problems with personal computers has been that they have been too difficult for the average person to use. This has been compounded by an appalling level of training documentation and an equally poor level of knowledgable customer support by dealers. Apple is trying to tackle all three problems with Lisa: a system which non-computer-types and poor typists can master relatively easily, truly comprehensive training and support materials, and an effort to sell only through selected dealers.