Creating contextual help for GUIs using screenshots

Tom Yeh, Tsung Hsiang Chang, Bo Xie, Greg Walsh, Ivan Watkins, Krist Wongsuphasawat, Man Huang, Larry S. Davis, Bederson Ben

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

31 Scopus citations

Abstract

Contextual help is effective for learning how to use GUIs by showing instructions and highlights on the actual interface rather than in a separate viewer. However, end-users and third-party tech support typically cannot create contextual help to assist other users because it requires programming skill and source code access. We present a creation tool for contextual help that allows users to apply common computer skills - taking screenshots and writing simple scripts. We perform pixel analysis on screenshots to make this tool applicable to a wide range of applications and platforms without source code access. We evaluated the tool's usability with three groups of participants: developers, instructors, and tech support. We further validated the applicability of our tool with 60 real tasks supported by the tech support of a university campus.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationUIST'11 - Proceedings of the 24th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology
Pages145-154
Number of pages10
DOIs
StatePublished - 2011
Event24th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, UIST'11 - Santa Barbara, CA, United States
Duration: 16 Oct 201119 Oct 2011

Publication series

NameUIST'11 - Proceedings of the 24th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology

Conference

Conference24th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, UIST'11
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySanta Barbara, CA
Period16/10/1119/10/11

Keywords

  • Contextual help
  • Help
  • Pixel analysis

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