Capturing users' actions in a Web application to support learnability

Usability is an important factor that affects use of systems. Numerous works have been introduced to improve usability especially in Web applications. However, usability features sometimes fail to meet the needs of diverse user communities with different requirements, expectations, and skill sets. Getting started with unfamiliar interfaces and learning new functionality have always remained as challenges to novices and even to experts in Web applications. Therefore, it is necessary for users to get help in learning Web functionality when problems arise. This paper proposes Action-Based Help technique to assist users in learning Web functions in real-time. A controlled experiment has been conducted to evaluate its effectiveness in comparison with the text-based online help. The result shows that adoption of the proposed technique in a Webmail was able to improve certain learnability metrics that are shorter time taken to complete tasks and lower frequency in accessing the help system.