Milene Selbach Silveira
Clarisse Sieckenius de Souza
Simone D. J. Barbosa
ABSTRACT
Our goal is to improve the content of help systems and provide better access to it, by giving users opportunities to signal breakdowns during interaction. To this end, we use a semiotic engineering model that explores both direct and indirect messages sent from designers to users via systems' interfaces. These messages represent how the designers conceived of the application, how they built it, and why. The online help system is an important component, because this is where designers have the best chances to explicitly express their vision. In this paper we review some of the classifications used to characterize help systems, and suggest that user-intent sensitivity should be explored as a new classification if we are targeting at efficient designer/user communication. We allow users to signal their intents by choosing among a limited set of predefined utterances, which provide an entry point to a cohesive discourse structure. The discourse is about the application's design rationale, and the operational and tactical instructions about how to use the application. Coupled with the application's conceptual model, and also the task and interaction models, these utterances allow help systems to provide information with increased probability of addressing the user's intentions.
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Index Terms
- Semiotic engineering contributions for designing online help systems
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