Visual interaction between end users and goal-based systems

Abstract

People spend considerable amounts of time and energy to plan and monitor work processes, such as preparing a conference, supervising a construction project or performing an energy audit. To assist people in the planning and monitoring stages of their work we present a visual task support system that is based on a cognitive model. An interactive visual language enables users to cope better with complex work requirements by taking advantage of Al planning techniques, diagrammatic representations of process networks and knowledge-based support. Components of the users' daily work are represented at many levels of abstraction. These components form a behavioral library that can be combined in new ways by system and user to create solutions to problems in situations not previously encountered. The effectiveness of a visual task support system is dependent upon the display techniques used to represent these components as well as the usability of the visual language; both enable the user to participate in planning domain tasks. The visual language and knowledge representation used in the task support system are based on a cognitive model of the human understanding of activities and their visualization. A usability study of visual interaction for task planning is reported.