Facilitating Computer Based User Activities: What, When, How?

Helping a user through her computer mediated activities arise important questions related to the complexity of the user-environment coupling. Unpredictable combinative situations make unrealistic attempts to help users in a prescriptive way. The term facilitating will be preferred to the term assisting for this reason. In this paper, we consider interaction traces as traced use experience inscriptions which are exploited as situated facilitating sources. The hypothesis of a possible empathy between these in­scriptions and the lived experience of the user founds the facilitating process we propose. This hypothesis lies on the ability for the user to appropriate the facilitating process because of the possibility for her to negotiate the way facilitating is processed. We illustrate the proposal by a companion which has been developed in order to facilitate the appropriation of a CAO package. This illustration shows how, concretely, traces are exploited as facilitating sources. Discussion draws a roadmap about traces systems, i.e., formalization of traces as new computer objects founding meta-cognitive exploitation by computer environment users.