Towards Authoring Tools For DIY Tutorials: From Tutorial User Strategies to Guidelines (Free Template Included!)

Abstract

Tutorials are essential for knowledge exchange in the DIY community. However, they often have quality issues leading to misunderstandings, mistakes, and safety risks. This indicates a need for research into how to design interactive systems that reduce author workload, improve tutorial quality, and present tutorial content more dynamically adapted to users’ needs. As a baseline for such research, we need to understand how tutorial users determine tutorial quality. To this end, we conducted a qualitative study with 13 makers seeking out tutorials to implement a chosen project. We observed them selecting tutorials and asked about their selection criteria and strategies in semi-structured retrospective interviews. We combined our findings with related work, derived tutorial authoring guidelines, and created an example template embodying these recommendations. Our contributions can benefit researchers and practitioners designing authoring tools for DIY tutorials, but also DIY tutorial authors and websites.