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ToolClips: an investigation of contextual video assistance for functionality understanding

Published: 10 April 2010 Publication History

Abstract

We investigate the use of on-line contextual video assistance to improve the learnability of software functionality. After discussing motivations and design goals for such forms of assistance, we present our new technique, ToolClips. ToolClips augment traditional tooltips to provide users with quick and contextual access to both textual and video assistance. In an initial study we found that users successfully integrated ToolClip usage into the flow of their primary tasks to overcome learnability difficulties. In a second study, we found that with ToolClips, users successfully completed 7 times as many unfamiliar tasks, in comparison to using a commercial professionally developed on-line help system. Users also retained the information obtained from ToolClips, performing tasks significantly faster one week later.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '10: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2010
    2690 pages
    ISBN:9781605589299
    DOI:10.1145/1753326
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 10 April 2010

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    Author Tags

    1. balloon help
    2. help
    3. learnability
    4. toolclips
    5. tooltips
    6. understanding
    7. video tool tips

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