Supporting user hypotheses in problem diagnosis

People are performing increasingly complicated actions on the web, such as automated purchases involving multiple sites. Things often go wrong, however, and it can be difficult to diagnose a problem in a complex process. Information must be integrated from multiple sites before relations among processes and data can be visualized and understood. Once the source of a problem has been diagnosed, it can be tedious to explain the process of diagnosis to others, and difficult to review the steps later.We present a web interface agent, Woodstein, that monitors user actions on the web and retrieves related information to assemble an integrated view of an action. It manages user hypotheses during problem diagnosis by capturing users' judgments of the correctness of data and processes. These hypotheses can be shared with others, including customer service representatives, or accessed later. We will see this feature in the context of diagnosing problems on the web, and discuss its broader applicability to system interfaces in general.