Making Software Tutorial Video Responsive

Cuong Nguyen, Feng Liu

Abstract: Tutorial videos are widely available to help people use software. These videos, however, are viewed by users as captured and offer little direct interaction between users and software. This paper presents a video navigation method that allows users to interact with software tutorial video as if they were using the software. To make the tutorial video responsive, our method records the user interaction events like mouse click and drag during capturing the video. Our method then analyzes, selects, and visualizes these user interaction events at the event locations. When a user directly interacts with an event visualization, our method automatically navigates to the proper video frame to provide the visual feedback as if the software were responding to the user input. Thus, our method provides the experience of interacting with the software through directly manipulating the tutorial video. Our study shows our method can better help users follow tutorial videos to complete tasks than the baseline timeline interface.