Executive Summary for Designing Online Help Systems: Report of Year 1 Activity.

摘要

Interactive computer systems were once used by highly-trained specialists. Today, complex computer systems are used by people with varying levels of skill and experience. Adequate on-line help systems must be designed so new or infrequent users will be able to effectively use the systems without lengthy training or experimentation. The purpose of this project was to perform a systematic investigation of on-line help and to develop guidelines for the design of on-line help systems for interactive computer systems. Three topics were hypothesized and investigated: 1) The help database should be arranged so that it can be efficiently maintained without sacrificing the capacity for many kinds of access and it should appear consistently so that entries can be added or amended easily. Alternate organizational strategies that balanced user-friendliness with ease of maintenance were developed and tested. 2) Each entry in the database should be structured for effective scanning and interpretation. Alternate presentation formats for on-line help information were evaluated. Optimal display strategies are reported. 3) The type of information in the data base should be specific to the users for which the on-line help system is designed. Procedures for assessing the kinds of information that will be useful were developed. Access channels to the on-line help database were designed.