Multi-level user support through adaptive hypermedia: a highly application-independent help component

Adaptive help components are an essential extension for complex systems that aim to provide usability to a broad range of users with different levels of expertise. The increasing availability of distributed hypermedia information generates new challenges for the development of adaptive help systems, including the realization of appropriate presentation, navigation, user modeling, and the integration with existing applications. After identifying the shortcomings of current hypermedia systems, we present an adaptive hypermedia help system that supports context-sensitive and user-adaptive presentation of hypermedia help variants on different levels of the user’s dialog with the application. The system supports user-controlled help adaptation and agent-based retrieval of additional hypermedia help information, and can easily be integrated into new and existing applications. This has already been realized with sample application systems in the area of medical imaging and CAD.