Experimental Evaluation of the effectiveness of expert online help strategies
Abstract
At present, most research on online help is focussing on the design of context-sensitive help systems. The influence of contextual help on the performances of users has not yet been studied extensively. Using a bottom-up approach, we first analyzed a set of dialogues between novice and expert users of a standard aplication software, in order to elicit and model the experts' help strategies. We then performed a comparative experimental study in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the experts' help strategies in comparison with standard non contextual online help in a simulated (W. of Oz) human-computer interaction environment. The paper presents and discusses results on the influence of users' a priori task knowledge on the efficiency of contextual, versus non contextual, online help. || Si la conception d'aides en ligne contextuelles a fait l'objet de nombreuses recherches, l'évaluation ergonomique de cette forme d'aide a suscité jusqu'à présent peu d'études. En appliquant une approche ascendante, nous avons dans un premier temps analysé