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Synchronous online help support with visual instruction aids for workflow-based MVC web applications

Published: 05 October 2009 Publication History

Abstract

Existing web-based help systems that provide interactive real-time assistance to end-users exhibit considerable limitations. Some of these limitations are related to the presence of invasive features in these systems, the asynchronous activities between the end-user and the technical support staff during a task-related help session, and the application-specific nature of these systems. The latter limitation in particular restricts the portability of these web-based help systems to other web applications. Despite advances in web development paradigms such as the workflow-based Model View Controller (MVC), and key technology ingredients such as synchronous web annotation services, we have not found any work that combines these technologies to address the above mentioned limitations. In this work we have designed and implemented a web-based help system as an abstract layer that can be seamlessly integrated with the architectural layers of any web application that is instantiated using the workflow-based MVC development paradigm. This layer uses the use cases of the instantiated application to ensure that task-related activities are synchronized during a help session. Our web-based help system also includes features to deliver instructive aids to end-users in the form of visual web annotations. In this paper we describe, using an example, the design and implementation of our system, discuss its limitations, and recommend directions for future work.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      SIGDOC '09: Proceedings of the 27th ACM international conference on Design of communication
      October 2009
      328 pages
      ISBN:9781605585598
      DOI:10.1145/1621995
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 05 October 2009

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      1. synchronous online help support
      2. visual web annotation

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      • (2018)Deconaby: Animations for Improving Understandability of Web ImagesHuman-Computer Interaction. Theories, Methods, and Human Issues10.1007/978-3-319-91238-7_23(269-282)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2018
      • (2014)Capturing users' actions in a Web application to support learnability2014 8th. Malaysian Software Engineering Conference (MySEC)10.1109/MySec.2014.6986004(142-147)Online publication date: Sep-2014

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