Community enhanced tutorials

Web-based tutorials are a popular help resource for learning how to perform unfamiliar tasks in complex software. However, in their current form, web tutorials are isolated from the applications that they support. In this paper we present FollowUs, a web-tutorial system that integrates a fully-featured application into a web-based tutorial. This novel architecture enables community enhanced tutorials, which continuously improve as more users work with them. FollowUs captures video demonstrations of users as they perform a tutorial. Subsequent users can use the original tutorial, or choose from a library of captured community demonstrations of each tutorial step. We conducted a user study to test the benefits of making multiple demonstrations available to users, and found that users perform significantly better using our system with a library of multiple demonstrations in comparison to its equivalent baseline system with only the original authored content.