Investigating Crowdsourced Help Facilities for Enhancing User Guidance

Abstract

We present two help facilities aimed at addressing the challenges faced by users new to a software. Software documentation should ideally familiarise with the overall functionality, navigate through the concrete workflows, and opportunities for customisation. Large degrees of freedom in the use and vast basic scopes, however, often make it infeasible to convey this information upfront. Rather, it needs to be broken into helpful bits and pieces which are delivered at appropriate times. In order to address this challenge, we have designed two concrete help facilities, i.e. tooltips and tips-of-the-day, to feature crowdsourced information. In this paper, we present the results of a formative study to implement early proofs-of-concept for the open-source game authoring platform Godot. To support further research, we have made the code base publicly available on GitHub.