Designing intelligent help for information processing systems

✍ Scribed by Conroy Mallen

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1996
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 359 KB
• Volume: 45
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1071-5819
• DOI: 10.1006/ijhc.1996.0056

✦ Synopsis

As information processing systems become more prevalent in the workplace there is an every expanding community of users that need to be instructed in their use . This requirement may be met by trainers and , to a lesser extent , by manuals (possibly presented on-line) . However , the first solution is expensive , and the second limited in its objectives . So the goal of the work described in this paper is to provide a methodology for the construction of integrated help systems that are capable of providing the quality of support of trainers but are as cheap and accessible as manuals .

This goal places extra constraints on the design and construction of the information processing system which must now be capable of taking account of the user's goals and previous experience if it is to be able to tune help adaptively to the context-of-use . Previous help systems have encountered problems integrating these requirements within a working application . The work described in this paper addresses these by noting that the designer's description of an application contains much information that is useful in explaining its workings . It will show how extending the designer's description of the information processing system (with a language that details how changes within the application occur) can allow for the