A HELP SYSTEM FOR COMMAND DRIVEN APPLICATIONS Michael Coyne and Aaron Konstam Trinity University, San Antonio Texas As the number of people who use computers has grown so has the percentage of novice users. Software manufacturers have reacted to this increase by including online help systems with their products. A number of researchers have investigated the design and usefulness of help systems. DunsmorO discovered in his studies that users of written documentation outperformed users of a help system. Clark2 working with the Interactive Chart Utifity help system discovered that users were confused or misled by the help system more often than they were actually helped. Stoddard3 led a group that studied the ICNHELP users at Los Alamos National Laboratories. They found that the majority of the users (97%) used the help system less than five times and many had difficulty in using it. It is readily apparent from these studies that the existance of an online help system will not guarantee its helpfullness to new users. The primary objective of this project is to develop a generalized help system. This help system, named HELPFUN, is intendeed to do the following: 1) exploit standard hardware features, 2) improve on
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