Breaking Tradition: Recreating Tutorials with Unconventional Techniques

Do-It-Yourself (DIY) tutorials have become part of our every day landscape. From IKEA style furniture directions to clothing tags detailing how to wash them, people are surrounded by directions listing the steps required to accomplish a task by themselves. The Maker movement, utilizing this form of instruction, has popularized and standardized the format. HCI research and tutorial makers explore methods of streamlining the creation of DIY tutorials, but very little research has been done to explore alternatives. By applying Research through Design (RtD) techniques, this work seeks to explore twelve alternative approaches to traditional tutorial presentation methods. Both amateur and expert participants were then asked nineteen different open-ended questions pertaining to the designed tutorials. Their responses were coded and sorted utilizing grounded theory, and serve to support the RtD methodologies already applied. The findings of this study reveal a need for identifying a tutorials audience, in addition to better supporting tutorial authors.