
 
Rogers, Sharp, Benyon, Holland and Carey, 1994), 
(Ziegler, 1996), (Dix, Finlay, Abowd and Beale, 
2003), both the types of user interfaces and the most 
common interaction styles were presented and 
categorized. Among which are the Command 
Languages, Forms fill-in, Natural Language, Point 
and Click, Direct Manipulation, Menu, and Question 
and Answer.
 
Our immediate objective is to look for the most 
appropriate UI for the OU, and, as we will see later, 
to examine whether its use and application are 
possible in the Web applications.
 
  Because the application users are mainly OUs, 
the use of interfaces based on Command languages 
can be ruled out. Functionalities such as Form 
filling, the natural language and point and click, 
have their limitations and can only be used for 
simple or restricted task domains, or to complement 
another basic interaction style.
 
Currently,  Direct Manipulation is the most 
common type of interaction in desktop applications. 
However, in spite of all of its advantages and its 
considerable functionality and usefulness, it is not 
necessarily intuitive or obvious enough for an OU. 
This is because these users would need to know or to 
learn the meaning of the visual representations, and 
the actions they can perform. Furthermore, in 
general these applications incorporate a large 
number of commands, menu options, toolbars and 
other independent semantic components, and 
normally these do not follow a hierarchical time 
structure which is suitable for the tasks or the 
objectives which the user is trying to accomplish at 
the specific moment of the interaction.
 
Probably, in most cases, Menu selection, and 
Questions and answers are the most useful to the 
OU, because they require only minimal expertise 
and guide users better than the alternative interactive 
styles. Nevertheless, these too have limitations as 
regards their functionality and usefulness.
 
  In conclusion then, none of the traditional 
interaction styles have been specifically conceived 
for, nor are explicitly oriented to, the OU and 
therefore for a large portion of Web application 
users. Thus, in this work we present an interaction 
style conceived especially for the OU, which we 
have called Goal Driven Interaction (GDI) and we 
will analyze whether its use is possible in the Web 
applications.  
4  GOAL DRIVEN INTERACTION  
Goal Driven Interaction or  GDI  (Carrillo, Guevara 
and Gálvez, 2002) is a human-computer interaction 
style that is especially suitable for the type of 
interactive applications to be used by the OU. 
 
This style, which has a conversational and 
sequential nature, can be considered a kind of 
combination of Menus, Direct manipulation and 
Wizards interaction styles. The aim is to guide, help 
and lead the user, step by step in a hierarchical and 
progressive way through the process of interacting 
with the application, based on the objectives and 
sub-objectives that the user has at a particular point. 
In order to accomplish these goals satisfactorily, the 
actions and tasks that must be carried out are 
described. All this must be done via a mechanism 
that holds simple and coherent at all times, using a 
simple UI with a well defined and organized 
structure (this will be described in section 5).  
The goal is to simplify as much as possible the 
syntactic knowledge necessary to use the system and 
to provide the user both with the semantic domain 
concepts both of the task and of the computer so as 
to be able to perform the tasks successfully.
 
As a consequence, all the tasks and actions that 
the user must carry out, both internal and external to 
the application, must be specified in a hierarchical 
way, and in enough detail so that any potential user 
will be able to understand them and carry out the 
tasks correctly. The aim is to eliminate or reduce the 
possibility of making mistakes as much as possible.  
In any case, it will be necessary to establish and to 
offer mechanisms for rectifying mistakes, undoing 
actions, and cancelling goals already initiated. 
 
The fundamentals of the GDI originate in the 
works of Newell and Simon (Newell and Simon, 
1972) on the human reasoning mechanism for 
resolving problems. Their vision of problem 
resolution (as in GDI) was based on the breaking 
down or analysis of the main or general objective, 
into a hierarchical tree of sub-objectives, whose 
branch lengths would depend on the degree of 
subdivision within the sub-objectives. In the leaves 
of the tree, we would find fundamental sub-
objectives reachable via basic information processes.  
Based on this work, Card, Moran and Newell 
(1980, 1983), developed the most important of the 
existing cognitive models, the Human Processor 
Model. That starting paradigm (as in GDI) considers 
the interaction process as a task of resolving 
problems. On the other hand, a psychological model 
of the humans is defined as consisting of three 
interactive systems: the perceptive, the motor and 
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