Diamond Help: A Generic Collaborative Task Guidance System

DiamondHelp is a generic collaborative task guidance system motivated by the current usability crisis in high-tech home products. It combines an application-independent conversational interface (adapted from online chat programs) with an application-specific direct-manipulation interface. DiamondHelp is implemented in Java and uses Collagen for representing and using task models. This article addresses both of these causes by introducing a new framework for building collaborative task guidance systems, called DiamondHelp. The dominant current paradigm for humancomputer interaction is direct manipulation (Shneiderman and Plaisant 2005), which can be applied with great effectiveness and elegance to those aspects of an interface that afford natural and intuitive analogies to physical actions, such as pointing, dragging, sliding, and so on.