Iterative Tutorial Design in the Product Development Cycle

Early development of a tutorial fostered a joint effort between human factors professionals, software developers and training consultants that resulted in early resolution of many problems during the development of Wang Freestyle™, a new multimedia communication system. It was decided that new users of Freestyle should be able to use the basic annotation features without referring to any hardcopy documentation. To ensure this, iterative tests of evolving prototypes of (1) the software and (2) an on-line tutorial that was designed to teach any features of the system that were not immediately intuitive were carried out. Changes were made in the software and the tutorial, resulting in improvements to both. The methods used and some of the lessons learned from this initial experience with iterative tutorial development are discussed.