Evaluation of a help system designed using interaction primitives to estimate the function schemata of users

This paper proposes a help system that would simplify the use of search functions on audio visual (AV) appliances. The proposed help system is equipped with an interface for user interaction that employs a frame-driven dialog model. The frames are designed using common structures extracted by analyzing device functions based on interaction primitives. In addition, the proposed help system estimates the types of common structures (function schema) on the basis of the operation history recorded prior to the user pressing the help button to reduce user effort. To ascertain the effectiveness of the function schema estimations, we constructed a help system for a DVD recorder and evaluated the decrease in user effort by using the operation history data of the DVD recorder derived from 30 tasks performed by 14 users. The experimental results showed an 8.6% reduction in user effort when compared to a system that does not apply function schema estimation.