It can be hard for tutorial creators to get fine-grained feedback about how learners are actually stepping through their tutorials and which parts lead to the most struggle. To provide such feedback for technical software tutorials, we introduce the idea of tutorial profiling, which is inspired by software code profiling. We prototyped this idea in a system called Porta that automatically tracks how users navigate through a tutorial webpage and what actions they take on their computer such as running shell commands, invoking compilers, and logging into remote servers. Porta surfaces this trace data in the form of profiling visualizations that augment the tutorial with heatmaps of activity hotspots and markers that expand to show event details, error messages, and embedded screencast videos of user actions. We found through a user study of 3 tutorial creators and 12 students who followed their tutorials that Porta enabled both the tutorial creators and the students to provide more specific, targeted, and actionable feedback about how to improve these tutorials. Porta opens up possibilities for performing user testing of technical documentation in a more systematic and scalable way.

Tutorials are vital for helping people perform complex software-based tasks in domains such as programming, data science, system administration, and computational research. However, it is tedious to create detailed step-by-step tutorials for tasks that span multiple interrelated GUI and command-line applications. To address this challenge, we created Torta, an end-to-end system that automatically generates step-by-step GUI and command-line app tutorials by demonstration, provides an editor to trim, organize, and add validation criteria to these tutorials, and provides a web-based viewer that can validate step-level progress and automatically run certain steps. The core technical insight that underpins Torta is that combining operating-system-wide activity tracing and screencast recording makes it easier to generate mixed-media (text+video) tutorials that span multiple GUI and command-line apps. An exploratory study on 10 computer science teaching assistants (TAs) found that they all preferred the experience and results of using Torta to record programming and sysadmin tutorials relevant to classes they teach rather than manually writing tutorials. A follow-up study on 6 students found that they all preferred following the Torta tutorials created by those TAs over the manually-written versions.