The Writers Gateway

When you create tutorials  for a software product, it is very natural to capture the following:

• Description about the product features
• All tasks that one can do with each of the product features
• Steps to complete each of the tasks

Most software product tutorials are product feature centric.

Here is an example  of a product feature centric tutorial for Camtasia. The very title of the tutorial indicates it is about adding a callout and setting callout properties in Camtasia.

The tutorial above tells you all that you can do with the callout feature in Camtasia. The tutorial talks about placing callouts, resizing callouts, the different kinds of callouts and so on.

When you work with callouts in Camtasia, you are likely to get flustered trying to manually resize the callout in the timeline. The callout will refuse to get resized. This is such a serious usability issue. People spend hours figuring out how to resize callouts in the timeline. If you notice, this particular tutorial above, which is about callouts, never ever once mentions or captures this usability issue. So imagine if users trying to figure out how to increase callout length in Camtasia, go through this particular tutorial, how frustrated they would feel, when they discover that this tutorial has no solution to their problem.

Product feature centric documentation and tutorials are good to have because they give a nice overview of the product features. But then it is even more important to have tutorials that will focus on the problems users  might face while they are using the product feature, especially if the problem is not going to be fixed in the product for sometime.

This is where user centric tutorials for software products work wonders.

Here are some examples of user centric tutorials for Camtasia :

• How to increase callout length in Camtasia
• How I learnt to work with Camtasia 
• How to achieve smooth visual effects in videos using Camtasia

When you look at the user centric tutorials above, they capture :

• Real use cases
• Real problems
• Solutions for all common problems

Well, such kind of information might go into the troubleshooting guide. But then it again takes quite a lot of effort for users to search for the problem and solution. Instead if you have short tutorials on common problems that users might face, it will save so much of their time.

It really makes a lot of sense to include such user centric tutorials in  help manuals or user guides where the user is likely to check for help. 

If a software product is complex or has an usability issue, the users will appreciate if it is revealed upfront and the solution is disclosed. After all users want to effectively use the product and not get surprises or shocks while trying to use the product

What do you think?