Synchronous online help support with visual instruction aids for workflow-based MVC web applications

Existing web-based help systems that provide interactive real-time assistance to end-users exhibit considerable limitations. Some of these limitations are related to the presence of invasive features in these systems, the asynchronous activities between the end-user and the technical support staff during a task-related help session, and the application-specific nature of these systems. The latter limitation in particular restricts the portability of these web-based help systems to other web applications. Despite advances in web development paradigms such as the workflow-based Model View Controller (MVC), and key technology ingredients such as synchronous web annotation services, we have not found any work that combines these technologies to address the above mentioned limitations. In this work we have designed and implemented a web-based help system as an abstract layer that can be seamlessly integrated with the architectural layers of any web application that is instantiated using the workflow-based MVC development paradigm. This layer uses the use cases of the instantiated application to ensure that task-related activities are synchronized during a help session. Our web-based help system also includes features to deliver instructive aids to end-users in the form of visual web annotations. In this paper we describe, using an example, the design and implementation of our system, discuss its limitations, and recommend directions for future work.

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