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Searching for software learning resources using application context

Published: 16 October 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Users of complex software applications frequently need to consult documentation, tutorials, and support resources to learn how to use the software and further their understand-ing of its capabilities. Existing online help systems provide limited context awareness through "what's this?" and simi-lar techniques. We examine the possibility of making more use of the user's current context in a particular application to provide useful help resources. We provide an analysis and taxonomy of various aspects of application context and how they may be used in retrieving software help artifacts with web browsers, present the design of a context-aware augmented web search system, and describe a prototype implementation and initial user study of this system. We conclude with a discussion of open issues and an agenda for further research.

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cover image ACM Conferences
UIST '11: Proceedings of the 24th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology
October 2011
654 pages
ISBN:9781450307161
DOI:10.1145/2047196
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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Publication History

Published: 16 October 2011

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Author Tags

  1. context-based search
  2. help search
  3. software learning

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UIST '11

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UIST '11 Paper Acceptance Rate 67 of 262 submissions, 26%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 561 of 2,567 submissions, 22%

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  • (2022)Contextual in situ help for visual data interfacesInformation Visualization10.1177/1473871622112006422:1(69-84)Online publication date: 9-Sep-2022
  • (2022)Thinking about help systemsProceedings of the 21st Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3554364.3559116(1-12)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2022
  • (2022)PONI: A Personalized Onboarding Interface for Getting Inspiration and Learning About AR/VR CreationNordic Human-Computer Interaction Conference10.1145/3546155.3546642(1-14)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2022
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