The design of an interactive online help desk in the Alexandria Digital Library

Abstract

In large software systems such as digital libraries, electronic commerce applications, and customer support systems, the user interface and system are often complex and difficult to navigate. It is necessary to provide users with interactive online support to help users learn how to effectively use these applications. Such online help facilities can include providing tutorials and animated demonstrations, synchronized activities between users and system supporting staff for real time instruction and guidance, multimedia communication with support staff such as chat, voice, and shared whiteboards, and tools for quick identification of user problems. In this paper, we investigate how such interactive online help support can be developed and provided in the context of a working system, the Alexandria Digital Library (ADL) for geospatially-referenced data. We developed an online help system, AlexHelp!. AlexHelp! supports collaborative sessions between the user and the librarian (support staff) that include activities such as map browsing and region selection, recorded demonstration sessions for the user, primitive tools for analyzing user sessions, and channels for voice and text based communications. The design of AlexHelp! is based on user activity logs, and the system is a light-weight software component that can be easily integrated into the ADL user interface client. A prototype of AlexHelp! is developed and integrated into the ADL client; both the ADL client and AlexHelp! are written in Java.