Zazu - Investigating the Difference between Interaction Approaches in Advisory Support Systems for Curriculum

Curriculum planning for students in a university which offers full-time as well as part-time courses is not a trivial task and is complicated by the fact that students can enrol for modules at different levels concurrently. A prototype advisory support tool was developed to address the problems related to documentbased advising. The tool supports two interactive advice approaches – a top-down backward-chaining style and a bottom-up forward-chaining style. An experiment with 20 participants compared these two different interaction approaches within a natural curriculum-planning context. The results show important design tradeoffs for supporting people in curriculum planning. This paper presents the results of the experiment. We discuss the cognitive aspects and implications for each interaction approach and how some UI design guidelines are supported and then draw conclusions about how best to structure user interaction in an advisory support tool based on the results.