ShowMeHow: translating user interface instructions between applications

  • Authors:

  • Vidya Ramesh;Charlie Hsu;Maneesh Agrawala;Björn Hartmann

  • Affiliations:

  • University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA;University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA;University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA;University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 24th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Many people learn how to use complex authoring applications through tutorials. However, user interfaces for authoring tools differ between versions, platforms, and competing products, limiting the utility of tutorials. Our goal is to make tutorials more useful by enabling users to repurpose tutorials between similar applications. We introduce UI translation interfaces which enable users to locate commands in one application using the interface language of another application. Our end-user tool, ShowMeHow, demonstrates two interaction techniques to accomplish translations: 1) direct manipulation of interface facades and 2) text search for commands using the vocabulary of another application. We discuss tools needed to construct the translation maps that enable these techniques. An initial study (n=12) shows that users can locate unfamiliar commands twice as fast with interface facades. A second study showed that users can work through tutorials written for one application in another application.