Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Daniel R Thorpe

Moneta K Ho Kushner

Anson Michael Horton

Douglas J Amaral

An application assistance system is described herein that provides an on-demand canonical user interface that can quickly allow a user to learn the actions exposed by an application, such as a web site. The application assistance system is a pattern and method for guiding the user of a site/application through a set of possible actions on a page by providing a well-known invocation of hints. These hints show the actions/tasks that a user can take on a page by visually spotlighting a specific area of the page and providing a tooltip or pop-up dialog that describes the action/task the user is trying to complete while preserving the data the user has already entered. The system also provides a task pane that supports randomly accessing various steps of a task the system is explaining. Thus, the system makes it much easier for a user to learn to use an application.

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Ben Lomond, CA, United States of America

Daniel R Thorpe