Browsing and Analyzing the Command-Level Structure of Large Collections of Image Manipulation Tutorials

Many people rely on Web-based tutorials to learn how to use complex software. Yet, it remains difficult for users to systematically explore the set of tutorials available online. We present Sifter, an interface for browsing, comparing and analyzing large collections of image manipulation tutorials based on their command-level structure. Sifter first applies supervised machine learning to identify the commands contained in a collection of 2500 Photoshop tutorials obtained from the Web. It then provides three different views of the tutorial collection based on the extracted command-level structure: (1) A Faceted Browser View allows users to organize, sort and filter the collection based on tutorial category, command names or on frequently used command subsequences, (2) a Tutorial View summarizes and indexes tutorials by the commands they contain, and (3) an Alignment View visualizes the commandlevel similarities and differences between a subset of tutorials. An informal evaluation (n=9) suggests that Sifter enables users to successfully perform a variety of browsing and analysis tasks that are difficult to complete with standard keyword search. We conclude with a meta-analysis of our Photoshop tutorial collection and present several implications for the design of image manipulation software. ACM Classification H5.2 [Information interfaces and presentation]: User Interfaces. Graphical user interfaces. Author