User Assistants:  Self-Sufficient Systems

 

Michael Harris & K. C. Burgess Yakemovic

NCR Human Interface Technology Center

 

 

Systems of all kinds are growing ever more complex, both vertically and horizontally, while the ability and willingness of users to put up with complexity is steadily decreasing.  This dilemma hurts all products in all markets.  An elegant solution is to empower products with built-in advisors that address user problems at the interface:  User Assistants, a.k.a. Associates, or Intelligent Agents

 

A User Assistant observes the user's activities, evaluates those activities against models of "correct" action, communicates the differences in powerful and effective ways, and adapts to the dynamic environment.  The first three of these behaviors are typical of a well-designed "just-in-time"  help system or Performance Support System; adaptive behavior is a key differentiator.

 

Adaptation can occur in a task, or in its interface.  Many text editors are adaptive tasks:  by means of keyboard macros, they can be made to mimic other editors or express different linguistic behaviors.  The User Assistant is an adaptive interface technology:   the more a user interacts with and through it, the more it can discover and conform to that user's habits, abilities, preferences, and goals, ever more accurately anticipating the user's intentions.

 

Such effective interaction requires multimedia technologies -- users have neither time nor inclination to key in help requests or read verbose text screens -- thus, every Assisted system must be a multimedia-capable system.  The software is composed of generic and task-specific data bases and code libraries, managed by a generic kernel or engine.

 

The opportunity exists to provide efficient cost-effective every-unit-item platform support for these interfaces (through multimedia support, ample processing power, and distributed data bases), to perfect a software architecture having the greatest possible amount of reusable components, and to provide well-crafted simple-to-use tools for constructing and tailoring those generic interface building blocks to specific applications. 

 

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