An adaptive user navigation mechanism and its evaluation

Recently, there have been many online help systems that provide usage explanations for applications. However, it is difficult to find out necessary information in help contents and to understand how to obtain complete information. A navigation mechanism which can provide a user with essential information and guide the user so that he can achieve intended actions is indispensable. In this paper, we propose an adaptive navigation system which prevents the display of navigation information on decisions that a user has already made by reflecting the current state of an application. In this research, in order to describe the structure of an application, Petri nets which are suitable for modeling event-driven systems are used. The application system is constructed based on these Petri nets. By communicating between the application system and its navigation system through these Petri nets, a user navigation system reflecting the execution state of the application can be realized