The problem of providing help for complex application interfaces has been a source of interest for a number of researcher efforts. As the computational power of computers increases, typical applications not only increase in functionality but also in the degree of interaction with the computational environment in which they reside. There are powerful software tools available today used for both specialized and non-specialized tasks that are often used by novice users who attempt tasks without significant training or knowledge of the application?s interface. These kinds of applications are diverse and complicated in the variety of functionality they provide, often interacting with other applications on the user?s system. With current platforms (Windows, Macintosh, Linux etc) providing extensive multi-tasking facilities, interaction with these applications is sometimes affected by the context of the environment itself (e.g., application windows being minimized, maximized or obscured by those of other applications). The interdependencies between applications and their environments increase the difficulty of providing effective context-sensitive help when building an application?s help documentation. The purpose of this research is to create an Intelligent Help System, which incorporates these interactions and affecting factors when providing help. The SmartAidè system, which was developed as part of this effort, works on the premise that the user has a goal when interacting with the application. This document will provide a detailed overview of the architecture of the system along with the underlying design decisions. The system was then evaluated against traditional application help documentation to test its effectiveness. The results and analysis of this evaluation have been enumerated.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:NCSU/oai:NCSU:etd-10282004-202721 |
| Date | 29 October 2004 |
| Creators | Ramachandran, Ashwin |
| Contributors | Dr. R. Michael Young, Dr. James Lester, Dr. Robert St. Amant |
| Publisher | NCSU |
| Source Sets | North Carolina State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/theses/available/etd-10282004-202721/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to NC State University or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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