We interviewed 9 users of diverse photoshop ability level. Here are our primary findings:
Tutorial creating:
People are not opposed to creating their own tutorials, but they were not very excited about it.
There are so many online resources already available (youtube, “how to” via google search, specific sites), people worry that they wouldn’t have a unique contribution or wouldn’t be as helpful. (Option to upload anonymously may help with this lack of confidence.)
There was not a big concern about copyright issues with uploading content (1 person of 9 expressed some concern).
Tutorials need to have enough detail – we would need to determine what the right level of detail is, though. How many screenshots to include? How much description?
Search/help patterns
Once people have found a successful website/”tutor” they keep going back
Some people search for helpful tutorials or tips by user (within a help site) – they trust people who have submitted helpful content in the past.
The expertise level of posters and responders is important – help responses and tutorial contributions shouldn’t be over people’s head.
We need to be conscious of findability – helping people find what they are looking for, and offering many ways to get to information. This was a concern for novices – people don’t know how to find what they need, and they also had trouble ‘re-finding’ information they had found in the past.
New concept
We met the other night and pretty much scrapped our original idea in favor of a new, more focused concept. The users we talked with had a hard time finding appropriate or good tutorials – they also had a hard time remembering tutorials they’d used in the past. So our idea is to bring the tutorials into photoshop, instead of the other way around.
We want to create a sidebar widget/panel (like the panels that appear in all adobe software) that allows people to search for tutorials on the web — the results would be pulled into the widget. Once there, people can annotate them, add tags, add ratings, and favorite them. And then they can sort the results by ratings by other photoshop users, read annotations by other photoshop users, etc. So it’s like a super social photoshop tutorial search, rated by photoshop users right through photoshop’s interface.
We imagine that the widget would sit on the side (like history, color, etc) and would start as a search box (see above). Maybe there would be an optional tag cloud view too. That would be ’state 1.’ Then searching would reveal search results, ’state 2.’ An awesome state 3 would be if you clicked on a video, and the video was embedded right in the sidebar. That way you don’t have to arrange windows on top of windows to watch a tutorial.
We’re much more excited about this idea, because it seems really useful and is much easier to wrap our heads around. We are working on the interface side and will continue to think about back end structure and implementation concerns.
Status Report
due february 4, 2010
Interview results
We interviewed 9 users of diverse photoshop ability level. Here are our primary findings:
Tutorial creating:
Search/help patterns
New concept
We met the other night and pretty much scrapped our original idea in favor of a new, more focused concept. The users we talked with had a hard time finding appropriate or good tutorials – they also had a hard time remembering tutorials they’d used in the past. So our idea is to bring the tutorials into photoshop, instead of the other way around.
We want to create a sidebar widget/panel (like the panels that appear in all adobe software) that allows people to search for tutorials on the web — the results would be pulled into the widget. Once there, people can annotate them, add tags, add ratings, and favorite them. And then they can sort the results by ratings by other photoshop users, read annotations by other photoshop users, etc. So it’s like a super social photoshop tutorial search, rated by photoshop users right through photoshop’s interface.
We imagine that the widget would sit on the side (like history, color, etc) and would start as a search box (see above). Maybe there would be an optional tag cloud view too. That would be ’state 1.’ Then searching would reveal search results, ’state 2.’ An awesome state 3 would be if you clicked on a video, and the video was embedded right in the sidebar. That way you don’t have to arrange windows on top of windows to watch a tutorial.
We’re much more excited about this idea, because it seems really useful and is much easier to wrap our heads around. We are working on the interface side and will continue to think about back end structure and implementation concerns.