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Graphstract: minimal graphical help for computers

Published: 07 October 2007 Publication History

Abstract

We explore the use of abstracted screenshots as part of a new help interface. Graphstract, an implementation of a graphical help system, extends the ideas of textually oriented Minimal Manuals to the use of screenshots, allowing multiple small graphical elements to be shown in a limited space. This allows a user to get an overview of a complex sequential task as a whole. The ideas have been developed by three iterations of prototyping and evaluation. A user study shows that Graphstract helps users perform tasks faster on some but not all tasks. Due to their graphical nature, it is possible to construct Graphstracts automatically from pre-recorded interactions. A second study shows that automated capture and replay is a low-cost method for authoring Graphstracts, and the resultant help is as understandable as manually constructed help.

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  • (2023)SmartRecorder: An IMU-based Video Tutorial Creation by Demonstration System for Smartphone Interaction TasksProceedings of the 28th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces10.1145/3581641.3584069(278-293)Online publication date: 27-Mar-2023
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  • (2022)Training industrial end‐user programmers with interactive tutorialsSoftware: Practice and Experience10.1002/spe.316753:3(729-747)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
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    cover image ACM Conferences
    UIST '07: Proceedings of the 20th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology
    October 2007
    306 pages
    ISBN:9781595936790
    DOI:10.1145/1294211
    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: 07 October 2007

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    Author Tags

    1. graphical abstracts
    2. minimal manuals
    3. software help

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    • (2023)SmartRecorder: An IMU-based Video Tutorial Creation by Demonstration System for Smartphone Interaction TasksProceedings of the 28th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces10.1145/3581641.3584069(278-293)Online publication date: 27-Mar-2023
    • (2022)Describing UI Screenshots in Natural LanguageACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology10.1145/356470214:1(1-28)Online publication date: 9-Nov-2022
    • (2022)Training industrial end‐user programmers with interactive tutorialsSoftware: Practice and Experience10.1002/spe.316753:3(729-747)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
    • (2021)Jessy: A Conversational Assistant for Tutoring Digital Board GamesExtended Abstracts of the 2021 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play10.1145/3450337.3483496(168-173)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2021
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    • (2014)EverTutorProceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/2556288.2557407(4027-4036)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2014
    • (2014)Capturing users' actions in a Web application to support learnability2014 8th. Malaysian Software Engineering Conference (MySEC)10.1109/MySec.2014.6986004(142-147)Online publication date: Sep-2014
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