YesElf: Personalized Onboarding for Web Applications

Onboarding users to a complex application or a new functionality can be a serious issue, especially for organizations that need to train their new employees. Using a complex application without proper training or guidance can lead to users' confusion and frustration. In this paper, we introduce the onboarding platform YesElf intended for web applications. Its approach to onboarding is to use embedded guides within the application; its novelty lies in the robustness, ease of setup and integration of the YesElf guides into any web-based application. Most importantly, YesElf supports personalized adaptation of user guidance. This, we demonstrate by a novel method for automated recognition of user's confusion in real time that we integrated into YesElf. The information on user's confusion serves as a basis for adaptive display of the guides, when they are needed the most. We evaluated the proposed method on the data collected in a user study with 60 participants and achieved 63% precision which outperforms the state-of-the-art classifier based on the eye tracking data (although, in our case, we used the more readily available mouse movement data).