Paper Info
Title
Semiotic engineering contributions for designing online help systems
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.
Year
DOI
Venue
2001
10.1145/501516.501523
SIGDOC
Keywords
Field
DocType
communicability,semiotic engineering contribution,user communication,best chance,better access,semiotic engineering,semiotic engineering model,conceptual model,help system,users opportunity,online help system,cohesive discourse structure,online help systems,interaction model,limit set,design rationale
World Wide Web,Conceptual model,Online help,Computer science,Entry point,Semiotic engineering,Human–computer interaction,Design rationale,Multimedia,Discourse structure
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
1-58113-295-6
12
0.79
References 
Authors
17
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Milene Selbach Silveira111834.46
clarisse sieckenius254380.38
Simone D. J. Barbosa339144.90