Automatically Associate Documentation with UI Components Using Watson

Automatically Associate Documentation with UI Components Using Watson
Documentation explains product functionality and troubleshooting tips, helping users when a feature or function of the product's operation is unclear. Documentation is exposed to the user through a plurality of techniques. A common approach is to provide a "Help" or "?" button next to UI components, in which the help button is linked to a relevant section of documentation. When the user clicks the button, a Help window is presented to offer assistance with that feature or section.

Today, these "Help" links for product UI components must be manually implemented and associated with relevant documentation.

Furthermore, as the product's UI or documentation evolves, they may quickly become inconsistent with each other. "Help" button links must be maintained to continue to reference relevant sections of documentation. This process is high maintenance and error prone. As a result, documentation often becomes generalized and vague to accommodate insignificant changes to the product's UI. This erodes the documentation's value to the user.

Last, a product usually has so much documentation that it's difficult for the user to find the correct section of text. As a result, a product's documentation loses value since relevant sections may not be easily identified and surfaced to the end-user. As a result, the user often avoids the documentation altogether.

Described herein is a method of automatically generating "Help" links for product UI components by inputting the component's textual content into an advanced relevancy search engine (e.g. IBM* Watson) to identify relevant sections of documentation, thus avoiding the manual implementation and maintenance of documentation links.

Today, known techniques require manual establishment and maintenance of links between product UI and product documentation. These links must be manually maintained to preserve correct functionality as the product changes or the documentation is updated. Worse, the user may manually input search criteria into a Help search engine to find helpful documentation resources. The disclosed invention automates the correlation of UI components to relevant documentation.

In the preferred embodiment, a user is interacting with a products UI. Textual content is unclear to the user. The user hovers over the UI text and a "Help" button automatically appears. The user clicks the help button. The system automatically...