Experiment with navigation and intelligent assistance

Abstract

Modern user interfaces make extensive use of navigation, a metaphor based on wayfinding in a physical space. Navigation can be an effective solution for many problems in understanding and manipulating a complex information space. Our work is in the area of intelligent assistance for decision support environments, where assistance may take the form of automatically exploring decision alternatives, recording justifications for actions, testing global consistency of local results, and generating audit trails, among other activities. This paper describes an experimental evaluation of assisted search in an artificial environment using navigation as a communication medium, under conditions that vary the quality of assistance.