The use of an automatic “To Do” list to guide structured interaction

Knowledge-driven editors can improve productivity by taking care of the low-level details of a design artifact, and by guiding the user through an interaction. Despite this, editors that dictate their knowledge too strongly can actually reduce usability by forbidding a sequence of interactions that the user has planned a sequence that may be the most natural to the user. This paper introduces the use of an automatically managed “To Do” list as the primary method for the knowledge agent to communicate to the user. The ‘To Do” list guides the user to a correctly constructed design artifact, without overly constraining the user. INTRODUCTION Syntax-directed editors, such as some programming teals, and graphical, network editors, have the desirable effect of ensuring that the manipulated artifact is at least syntactically correct. For example, they ensure that a piece of program cede contains no spurious or missing text items, or that an architectural drawing has doors placed in the walls instead of in the middle of moms. Although the tool may have syntactic, superficial knowledge of the domain, it’s unlikely to have much semantic, deep knowledge the tool would have to be at least as intelligent as the user to have complete domain knowledge. This means that the user is likely, at some stage, to produce a design artifact that contains semantic errors even though the editor has aeeepted it as correct, For the purposes of this paper we can ignore how semantic errors are recognised, and just assume that an expert user is able to spot an error that they’ve made. For example, the designer may simply be reconsidering an earlier, hastily made, opportunistic decision. This is a normal part of expert designer’s behaviour [2, 5]. Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the ACM copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of ACM. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and/or specific permission. CHI’ Companion 95, Denver, Colorado, USA