Navigational Aids

In the ideal situation, navigational help would be unnecessary because it would be intuitively obvious how to use the system. But for the APT, help may play an important role in gaining user acceptance. Making the APT intuitive is difficult because some users come from a pure UNIX background and have little experience with certain user interface conventions, such as those of Windows. An online manual will be provided. However, in our experience, users would prefer not to read such documentation. They tend to use help capabilities when a problem or confusion arises. Users seek online manuals as a last resort because problem resolution through manuals often requires an uncertain search for the appropriate information. More directed help capabilities will likely be more useful.

One means of help is object based. In this scheme a user can elect for help on an object on the screen, such as an aperture in the Visual Target Tuner. The help provides a list of operations that can be carried out on that object and the means to carry out the operations. For example, if a user selected help on an exposure, the user would be provided options to

• remove this exposure from the display
• delete this exposure from the proposal
• copy this exposure
• edit this exposure's details (exposure editor)
• switch to the orbit view of this exposure

Wizards are another form of help that could be usefully applied to proposal preparation. The user would be guided through a series of steps for proposal preparation.

Also, we believe users tend to learn by example. We intend to provide a tutorial of several use cases. Java automated testing tools could be adapted to allow users to observe a proposal being developed.