Tutorial Developers: People have recentld shown interest in developing on-line tutorials to help users learn the key concepts of their applications. The following is a reprint of an article that was printed in the September/October 1996 issue of Eye For Design. I thought you might find this of interest. (There is information on how to get a sample issue of Eye For Design at the end of this message.) - o - o - o - Tutorial Lessons We've Learned by Carolyn Snyder In testing printed and online tutorials, we learned some lessons of our own! We learned what users expect from a tutorial, and how they work with it. We also saw some problems a designer can encounter when putting a tutorial online. _____________________ Users Go Out of Order In our tests, users chose their own path through the tutorials. One tutorial was presented in a particular sequence because it involved building an application. If users completed sections out of order, subsequent sections were not possible because of missing prerequisites. Despite a strong recommendation at the start of the tutorial to complete all sections in order, some users still skipped ahead to topics of greatest interest. The designers realized that it would have been better to make each section stand alone to support the users' exploratory behavior. _________________ Frequent Feedback Two tutorials we tested were initially designed so that the user spent the first several chapters constructing an application, and the verification step of actually running the application wasn't introduced until much later. Users weren't comfortable with this -- they wanted feedback early and often on their work. It's more gratifying to get something working really quickly, even if it's just a skeleton, like the classic "Hello world" application often used to introduce a new programming language. _______________________ Repetition Isn't Useful The purpose of the tutorials we tested was to introduce product concepts, not to improve user proficiency at completing tasks. We saw that users tended to skip sections of a tutorial that involved purely mechanical repetition. For example, when building a database form containing five similar edit fields, users created the first field or two, and then skipped ahead to the next unique activity. They commented that they didn't perceive any value in the repetition. _______________________ Been There? Done That? When we tested an online tutorial, users had trouble knowing what portions they had and hadn't covered, especially if they traversed sections out of order. In a couple cases, users accidentally skipped sections. The designers responded by adding checkmarks to completed sections and by highlighting the recommended next section -- this helped. __________ Can't Skim In an online tutorial, users found it much harder to skim or skip portions of the content than with a printed book. In early tests of one online tutorial, we found that users were annoyed when the tutorial covered material they already knew. In some cases, their annoyance was strong enough to color their perception of the entire product. This was actually good news for the development team -- they took out the annoying parts, shortening the tutorial and improving its effectiveness at the same time. __________________________ Sharing Screen Real Estate Sometimes, an online tutorial has to share screen real estate with the software. In one tutorial we tested, both the tutorial and the application needed the whole screen, so the user had to switch back and forth. We found two issues with this: Chunking of material: Users sometimes didn't remember when they were supposed to switch back to the tutorial. In testing, we found that some of the switches came at awkward times. The switches felt more natural to users when they occurred at a point of closure, such as clicking OK in a dialog box. If the tutorial expected the user to leave the dialog box open, we saw that the user would often get out of sync with the instructions. Based on this feedback, the designers re-chunked the material to fit the patterns that were more natural to users. Remembering data: Almost every time users had to remember data (such as the name of the file they were supposed to open) they either went back to the tutorial to look at it again, or they entered it wrong. The design team discussed ways to show the user the data right on the screen. ____________________________ Auto-pacing Impairs Learning Printed tutorials are inherently user-paced, but the designer of an online tutorial can make it automatically paced by having it go to the next screen after a pre-determined delay. We saw that users may absorb less content in an automatically-paced tutorial, when the pace is not under their control. The online tutorial we tested started out auto-paced, moving to the next screen as soon as the audio finished. Users were quite passive. Rather than utilizing the Pause button, users opted to let the tutorial run at the pace the designer had set. When we tested a self-paced design with Back and Next buttons, we found that users' learning style became more active. They spent noticeably more time on the screens that contained new concepts, taking the time to study illustrations and re-read text before going on. This had a positive effect on the amount of information they retained -- users who tested the self-paced design did better at answering technical questions about the material covered by the tutorial. ____________________ When Animation Helps One online tutorial displayed some complex visuals and devoted several screens of text to explaining them. We found that the first time the visual appeared, users spent a fair amount of time studying the whole thing, not realizing that the next several screens of the tutorial would explain everything they were looking at. The designers added some simple animation -- the tutorial highlighted the section currently under discussion with a briefly flashing outline. This helped the users realize that the tutorial was going to discuss parts of the illustration in sequence, so they didn't have to figure out everything on their own. - o - o - o - Eye For Design is published six times a year with articles on a variety of product design and usability issues. If you would like a complimentary issue mailed to you, just send your postal address to efd@uie.com. (Sorry, we do not have an email version available, yet.) Hope you found this to be of interest. Jared p.s. We'll ship your complimentary issue anywhere in the world, as long as you tell us what country your from.