Several recent studies of ERP system interfaces have confirmed that their poor usability hinders worker productivity, despite the huge investments companies make in user training and support. Usability challenges arise from the complexity of ERP systems, which are designed as a universal tool for a plethora of organizational practices and contexts. Learning to operate within an excessively vast terrain of ERP task pages and parameters is a significant challenge for most ERP users. Our proposed solution relies on the system itself to share task and process information in order to guide users through learning and performing their business tasks with the system. This perspective arises from employing the human–computer collaboration approach to the design of user interfaces, which we apply as a guiding framework for our research. In this paper, we present two interface components for providing ERP system users with task and process guidance: Automated Playback and Interactive Process Visualization. The novelty of our approach comes from using the history of past interactions to dynamically compose animated demonstrations of task interfaces and to provide an interactive graphical map of the current process being worked on by the user.

The development of the collaborative critique (CC) usability inspection method was driven by the need for systems to lessen the workload on their users. In the collaborative view of system–user interaction, the role of the system is expanded to that of a partner that must help its users achieve their goals. This perspective shifts the dynamic from focusing on the user’s ability to make effective use of the system to the system’s usefulness within a given task, user, and interaction context. The CC method consists of a walkthrough evaluation in which the questions answered at each step of the interaction assess the system’s collaborative strength. This method is further distinguished by the inclusion of questions that access the behavior of the system in error situations. This article provides a detailed description of the CC method and its application and demonstrates its usefulness in evaluating an interface.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are widely used but notoriously difficult to learn and master. The authors propose that a database approach to representing the system’s tasks, interface components, and usage logs in conjunction with the ERP domain data can serve as a foundation for improving system usability. The framework the authors designed supports automatic logging of user-system interactions and automated analysis of the logged data for enabling a variety of interface enhancements and assessments that can be performed dynamically by the system. Compared to existing work on usage logging, the authors’ framework expands the logging capabilities of ERP systems while providing a unifying basis for many different kinds of applications of log data.

We introduce a new usability walkthrough method called Collaborative Critique (CC), which is inspired by the human-computer collaboration paradigm of system-user interaction. This method applies a "collaboration lens" to assessing the system's behavior and its impact on the user's efforts in the context of the task being performed. We present findings from a laboratory evaluation of the CC method with usability practitioners, in which the results of the CC walkthrough were compared to a benchmark set of problems collected via user testing with two experimental Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system tasks. The development of this new usability evaluation method was driven by the need for an approach that assesses the adequacy of the system's support for reducing the user's cognitive and physical effort in the context of the interaction.

Corporate and academic communities have focused a great deal of attention on formalized approaches for creating, capturing, and propagating knowledge. Far less attention has been paid to the informal mechanisms that individuals share and employ to help them navigate complex processes in order to ‘get things done.’ In this paper, we examine the creation, use, and content of informal documents for supporting users of an enterprise resource planning system in a Fortune 500 company. We contend that such notes, which are commonly used for supporting information systems-related work, are an overlooked source of knowledgeability about organizational practices. This study is a first but necessary step in analyzing the types of information that can be derived from informal notes so that organizations can more fully utilize this largely untapped resource.

We consider the problem of reasoning and planning with incomplete knowledge and deterministic actions. We introduce a knowledge representation scheme called PSIPLAN that can effectively represent incompleteness of an agent's knowledge while allowing for sound, complete and tractable entailment in domains where the set of all objects is either unknown or infinite. We present a procedure for state update resulting from taking an action in PSIPLAN that is correct, complete and has only polynomial complexity. State update is performed without considering the set of all possible worlds corresponding to the knowledge state. As a result, planning with PSIPLAN is done without direct manipulation of possible worlds. PSIPLAN representation underlies the PSIPOP planning algorithm that handles quantified goals with or without exceptions that no other domain independent planner has been shown to achieve. PSIPLAN has been implemented in Common Lisp and used in an application on planning in a collaborative interface.

In traditional human-computer interfaces, a human master directs a computer system as a servant, telling it not only what to do, but also how to do it. Collaborative interfaces attempt to realign the roles, making the participants collaborators in solving the person's problem. This paper describes Writer's Aid, a system that deploys AI planning techniques to enable it to serve as an author's collaborative assistant. Writer's Aid differs from previous collaborative interfaces in both the kinds of actions the system partner takes and the underlying technology it uses to do so. While an author writes a document, Writer's Aid helps in identifying and inserting citation keys and by autonomously finding and caching potentially relevant papers and their associated bibliographic information from various on-line sources. This autonomy, enabled by the use of a planning system at the core of Writer's Aid, distinguishes this system from other collaborative interfaces. The collaborative design and its division of labor result in more efficient operation: faster and easier writing on the user's part and more effective information gathering on the part of the system. Subjects in our laboratory user study found the system effective and the interface intuitive and easy to use.