An Application-Independent Intelligent User Support System Exploiting Action-Sequence Based User Modelling

Many software systems’ usability suffers from their complexity, usually caused by the market-driven trend to bundle a huge amount of features, which are supposed to increase the product’s attractiveness. This attempt, however, more often than not leads to software with poor usability characteristics, therefore requiring an extensive amount of initial effort for the users to become familiar with the system. One way to overcome this problem is by providing user-adapted usage support. In this paper we present an experimental system for intelligent user support, which has been developed under the aspect of portability. Focusing on this goal, the system supports a variety of userand task-modeling approaches and is independent from the hosting software application environment, thus being ready to integrate with existing and new applications. The different user-modeling approaches have been empirically evaluated and compared in a medical software application embedding our system. The results of this evaluation are briefly described in the report.