Ankara : The Department of Computer Engineering and the Graduate School of Engineering and Science of Bilkent University, 2012.Thesis (Master's) -- Bilkent University, 2012.Includes bibliographical references.User assistance systems act as a guide for the users of software products. These
systems aim to guarantee a successful user experience by helping in performing
tasks. Early on, off-line user manuals were mostly the mediums of user assistance,
and technically, they were independent of the systems they belong to. The
upward trend in user assistance systems is that the provision of assistance is automated
through some attached mechanisms to the software systems. There have
been numerous proposals introducing fresh and novel methods for the purpose
of automated user assistance. Specifically, embedded user assistance consists of
instructional or conceptual information that appears within a software application
window. It includes embedded help that appear within the application, field
labels, and page overviews.
The overall objective of this thesis is to reveal the state of the art advances in
user assistance systems, and to propose a tool framework for developing contextsensitive
user assistance systems. Firstly, we conducted two systematic literature
reviews for both automated and embedded user assistance systems. The systematic
literature reviews are required for acquiring solid background on embedded
user assistance systems as well as for exploring the main obstacles to automated
user assistance systems. The research findings are presented in parallel with the
work published in the literature, and we aim at revealing a variety of techniques
used for automated and embedded user assistance. The systematic reviews are
conducted by a multiphase study selection process under a lot of articles obtained
by dedicated search strategies. Since there has been no study to systematically
undertake the state of user assistance systems, our work has a pioneering value
of contents providing a road-map of current trends for further researchers in the
field of user assistance. Having analyzed the results of systematic reviews, we conducted a survey of
help authoring tools that revealed the lack of generalized context-sensitive user
assistance solutions. Also, the utilization of methods, algorithms and tools differs
from domain to domain, being rather scattered. We aimed at developing
embedded context-sensitive user assistance systems, which is not trivial and has
to meet several challenges. Unfortunately, user-assistance concerns such as help
content and related weaving information cannot be easily localized in single modules
and as such tend to crosscut multiple modules. The reuse of user assistance
tools for different applications is required because developing custom-based user
assistance for each separate application is laborious. Consequently, the obstacles
related to the development of context-sensitive user assistance systems have
brought out the idea of a tool framework for this purpose. To address these issues
we developed an aspect-oriented tool framework Assistant-Pro that can be
used to develop context-sensitive embedded user assistance for multiple applications.
The framework provides tools for defining the process model, defining
guidance related to process steps, and modularizing and weaving help concerns
in the target application for which user guidance needs to be provided. The tool
has been originally developed and validated in the context of Aselsan, a large
Turkish defense electronics company.Açar, MuratM.S
