title: "Porta: Profiling Software Tutorials Using Operating-System-Wide Activity Tracing"
authors: Alok Mysore and Philip J. Guo
venue: ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST)
year: 2018
footer: "Best Paper Award"
links:
- Blog post
tweet: Porta lets tutorial creators see how learners followed their tutorials and where they struggled
abstract: >
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.
bibtex: >
@inproceedings{MysoreUIST2018,
author = {Mysore, Alok and Guo, Philip J.},
title = {Porta: Profiling Software Tutorials Using Operating-System-Wide Activity Tracing},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 31st Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology},
series = {UIST '18},
year = {2018},
isbn = {978-1-4503-5948-1},
location = {Berlin, Germany},
pages = {201--212},
numpages = {12},
url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/3242587.3242633},
doi = {10.1145/3242587.3242633},
acmid = {3242633},
publisher = {ACM},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
keywords = {activity tracing, software tutorials, tutorial profiling},
}