User Support: Design, Approaches, and Techniques for Effective Help Systems, Slides of Human Resource Management

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chapter 11

user support

user support

• Issues
  • different types of support at different times
  • implementation and presentation both important
  • all need careful design
• Types of user support
  • quick reference, task specific help, full explanation, tutorial
• Provided by help and documentation
  • help - problem-oriented and specific
  • documentation - system-oriented and general
  • same design principles apply to both

Approaches to user support

• Command assistance
  • User requests help on particular command e.g., UNIX man, DOS help
  • Good for quick reference
  • Assumes user know what to look for
• Command prompts
  • Provide information about correct usage when an error occurs
  • Good for simple syntactic errors
  • Also assumes knowledge of the command

Approaches to user support (ctd)

• Context sensitive help
  • help request interpreted according to context in which it occurs. e.g. tooltips
• On-line tutorials
  • user works through basics of application in a test environment.
  • can be useful but are often in flexible.
• On-line documentation
  • paper documentation is made available on computer.
  • continually available in common medium
  • can be difficult to browse
  • hypertext used to support browsing.

Adaptive Help Systems

• Use knowledge of the context, individual user,

task, domain and instruction to provide help

adapted to user's needs.

• Problems
  • knowledge requirements considerable
  • who has control of the interaction?
  • what should be adapted?
  • what is the scope of the adaptation?

Knowledge representation

User modeling

• All help systems have a model of the

user

• single, generic user (non-intelligent)
• user-configured model (adaptable)
• system-configure model (adaptive)

Knowledge representation

Domain and task modelling

• Covers
  • common errors and tasks
  • current task
• Usually involves analysis of command

sequences.

• Problems
  • representing tasks
  • interleaved tasks
  • user intention

Knowledge representation

Advisory strategy

• involves choosing the correct style of advice

for a given situation.

e.g. reminder, tutorial, etc.

• few intelligent help systems model advisory

strategy, but choice of strategy is still

important.

Problems with knowledge

representation and modelling

• knowledge acquisition
• resources
• interpretation of user behaviour

Issues in adaptive help

• Initiative
  • does the user retain control or can the system direct the interaction?
  • can the system interrupt the user to offer help?
• Effect
  • what is going to be adapted and what information is needed to do this?
  • only model what is needed.
• Scope
  • is modelling at application or system level?
  • latter more complex e.g. expertise varies between applications.

Presentation issues

• How is help requested?
  • command, button, function (on/off), separate application
• How is help displayed?
  • new window, whole screen, split screen,
  • pop-up boxes, hint icons
• Effective presentation requires
  • clear, familiar, consistent language
  • instructional rather than descriptive language
  • avoidance of blocks of text
  • clear indication of summary and example information

Implementation issues

Is help

• operating system command
• meta command
• application

Structure of help data

• single file
• file hierarchy
• database

What resources are available?

• screen space
• memory capacity
• speed

Issues

• flexibility and extensibility
• hard copy
• browsing