How can a new user learn an unfamiliar application, especially if it is a high-functionality (hi-fun) application, like Photoshop, Excel, or programming language IDEfi Many applications provide introductory videos, illustrative examples, and documentation on individual operations. Tests show, however, that novice users are likely to ignore the provided help, and try to learn by exploring the application first. In a hi-fun application, though, the user may lack understanding of the basic concepts of an application's operation, even though they were likely explained in the (ignored) documentation. This paper introduces steptorials ("stepper tutorials"), a new interaction strategy for learning hi-fun applications. A steptorial aims to teach the user how to work through a simple, but nontrivial, example of using the application. Steptorials are unique because they allow varying the autonomy of the user at every step. A steptorial has a control structure of a reversible programming language stepper. The user may choose, at any time, to be shown how to do a step, be guided through it, use the application interface without constraint, or to return to a previous step. It reduces the risk in either trying new operations yourself, or conversely, the risk of ceding control to the computer. It introduces a new paradigm of mixed-initiative learning of application interfaces.

Program debugging can be an expensive, complex and frustrating process. Conventional programming environments provide little explicit support for the cognitive tasks of diagnosis and visualization faced by the programmer. ZStep 94 is a program debugging environment designed to help the programmer understand the correspondence between static program code and dynamic program execution. Some of ZStep 94's innovations include: • An animated view of program execution, using the very same display used to edit the source code • A window that displays values which follows the stepper's focus • An incrementally-generated complete history of program execution and output • "Video recorder " controls to run the program in forward and reverse directions and control the level of detail displayed • One-click access from graphical objects to the code that

This article describes a series of tests of the generality of a “radically tailorable” tool for cooperative work. Users of this system can create applications by combining and modifying four kinds of building blocks: objects, views, agents, and links . We found that user-level tailoring of these primitives can provide most of the functionality found in well-known cooperative work systems such as gIBIS, Coordinator, Lotus Notes, and Information Lens. These primitives, therefore, appear to provide an elementary “tailoring language” out of which a wide variety of integrated information management and collaboration applications can be constructed by end users.

Article Experiments with Oval: a radically tailorable tool for cooperative work Share on Authors: Thomas W. Malone View Profile , Kum-Yew Lai View Profile , Christopher Fry View Profile Authors Info & Claims CSCW '92: Proceedings of the 1992 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative workDecember 1992 Pages 289–297https://doi.org/10.1145/143457.143532Online:01 December 1992Publication History 87citation412DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations87Total Downloads412Last 12 Months3Last 6 weeks0 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access