Prototyping an Interactive User Guide with Contextual Help
Abstract: This paper reports a work in progress for prototyping an interactive user guide application which replicates the user-system interface and mimics the functionality of an actual software tool. The interactive user guide offers embedded contextual help for user assistance. A comparative study between the interactive user guide and a video tutorial for guiding users in performing a procedural task is presented. Findings indicate that contextual help provided as part of the user-system interface is more effective that non-contextual help for user assistance in terms of task completion, frequency of assistance required, and time to complete the task. However, user assistance based on contextual help, needs additional resource to support the learners to reflect on procedural task to facilitate long-term encoding of information.
Presider: Christina Gawlik, Cyber Innovation Center