"Looks cool, I'll try this later!": Understanding the faces and uses of online tutorials

Abstract

Despite their prevalence, little is known about how users make use of web tutorials or feature-rich applications, and why authors take the time to create them. In this paper, we analyze comments posted to web tutorials to understand the purposes that tutorials serve for users, and examine the tutorials themselves to understand their structure and authors' motivations to create them. Our results indicate that users come to tutorials for help performing techniques with applications, and to achieve complex end results beyond their current expertise. As for tutorial authors, we found that most tutorials had clear extrinsic reasons for existing, including earning ad or referral revenue, promoting premium products or services, or acting as portfolios for their authors. Based on these results, we suggest a number of improvements to current tutorial interfaces.