Creating Contextual Help for GUIs Using Screenshots

Abstract

Contextual help is effective for learning how to use GUIs by showing instructions and highlights on the actual inter- face rather than in a separate viewer. However, end-users and third-party tech support typically cannot create contex- tual help to assist other users because it requires program- ming skill and source code access. We present a creation tool for contextual help that allows users to apply common computer skills—taking screenshots and writing simple scripts. We perform pixel analysis on screenshots to make this tool applicable to a wide range of applications and plat- forms without source code access. We evaluated the tool’s usability with three groups of participants: developers, in- structors, and tech support. We further validated the ap- plicability of our tool with 60 real tasks supported by the tech support of a university campus.