Intelligently Creating Contextual Tutorials for GUI Applications

Contextual tutorials provide precise, real-time indicators and instructions within context for learning GUI applications that are often complex albeit useful to many users. However, very few tools and platforms exist for peer users to efficiently generate and share such interactive tutorials. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a peer-to-peer tutorial (PPTutorial), a prototype system that serves 1) a novel tool to intelligently generate contextual tutorials across major GUI applications, saving contributors´ efforts and improving users´ learning experience, and 2) a crowd sourcing platform to facilitate producing, sharing, redeveloping, and searching for tutorials, via advanced design and implementation (e.g., Merging, labeling, and contextual search). We report findings from two experiments and interviews to evaluate the performance and user experience for both creating tutorials and learning. The results demonstrate that PPTutorial is well accepted and considered by the participants to provide easy and confident experience. This suggests PPTutorial is a valuable tool to explore the possibility of developing solutions to crowd-source and share contextual tutorials among vast Internet users.