Design and Evaluation of Social CheatSheet: A Community-Curated Software Help Overlay

Abstract

Software users can often find it difficult to sift through dense help pages, tutorials, Q&A sites, blogs, and other resources, trying to locate useful task-specific instructions for the applications they use. We present Social CheatSheet, an interactive information overlay that can appear atop any existing web application and retrieve relevant step-by-step instructions, tips, and tutorials curated by a community of software users. Based on the findings from two formative studies, the system offers several features for users to search, browse, filter, and bookmark community-generated help content, and to ask questions and seek clarifications. Furthermore, Social CheatSheet includes embedded curation features for users to generate, annotate, and categorize their own visual notes and tutorials, which can be kept private or shared publicly with the user community. A week-long deployment study with 15 participants showed that users were able to easily add and curate their own content and locate help resources generated by other users. They found the social curation approach to be helpful in a variety of contexts, and the majority of users wanted to keep using the system beyond the deployment. We discuss the potential of Social CheatSheet, as an application-independent platform driven by community curation efforts, to lower the barriers in finding relevant help and instructions for feature-rich applications.