Improving electronic guidebook interfaces using a task-oriented design approach

Item selection is a key problem in electronic guidebook design. Many systems do not apply so-called `context-awareness' technologies to infer user interest, placing the entire burden of selection on the user. Conversely, to make selection easier, many systems automatically eliminate information that they infer is not of interest to the user. However, such systems often eliminate too much information, preventing the user from finding what they want. To realize the full potential of electronic guidebooks, designers must strike the right balance between automatic context-based inference and manual selection. In this paper, we introduce a task-oriented model of item selection for electronic guidebooks to help designers explore this continuum. We argue that item-selection contains three sub-tasks and that these sub-tasks should be considered explicitly in system design. We apply our model to existing systems, demonstrating pitfalls of combining sub-tasks, and discuss how our model has improved the design of our own guidebook prototype.