Hypermedia manuals for interactive systems

As interactive devices become more sophisticated, and if systems are revised frequently, it will become ever more difficult for manufacturers to provide manuals that suitably explain them. This statement alone justifies the investigation and development of a paradigm for systems and electronic manuals. Traditional paper-based manuals for systems are extremely limited, containing simple linear descriptions of tasks, sub-tasks and interface component synchronisation. The writing of such manuals is time-consuming, difficult and error-prone, particularly when they are developed by humans unaided. As devices get more elaborate, supporting more features, it becomes necessary to employ support tools to reduce the cognitive load of the developer/writer in handling their associated manuals. In this paper, to resolve these issues, we propose a solution based on developing hypermedia-based electronic manuals-which enhance systems and support a number of additional benefits for the user and designer. We have developed a novel approach to the provision of manuals, as hypermedia documents derived from interactive systems, which exactly mirror the device being designed. This framework directly supports automatic generation of complete and correct manuals for these devices. (Our system, HyperDoc, produces HTML to represent both interactive and conventional manuals for dissemination over the World Wide Web).