Automatic generation of help from interface design models

This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in CHI '94, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/191666.191751Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsModel-based interface design can save substantial effort in building help systems for interactive applications by generating help automatically from the model used to implement the interface, and by providing a framework for developers to easily refine the automatically-generated help texts. This paper describes a system that generates hypertext-based help about data presented in application displays, commands to manipulate data, and interaction techniques to invoke commands. The refinement component provides several levels of customization, including programming-by-example techniques to let developers edit directly help windows that the system produces, and the possibility to refine help generation rulesRoberto Moriyon is supported by a grant from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science. Pedro Szekely and Robert Neches are supported by ARPA through Contract Numbers NCC 2-719 and NO0174-91-0014