Generation of Tutorial Systems on PCs for Smartphone Apps

The total number and diversity of smartphone users are increasing. Additionally, their usage varies such as communication, document processing and online shopping. Applications realize different usages to meet users’ requirements. However, some users are unfamiliar with smartphones. They have difficulty learning the operations and need support. A tutorial system, which provides operations along with users’ status, is effective to resolve these issues. However, showing both the target application’s screen and the tutorial on a smartphone display is challenging. Herein we propose a method to generate a system that shows tutorials on a Personal Computer (PC). The target application on a smartphone and the tutorial system on a PC are connected. The user’s status is sent to the tutorial system to realize a customized tutorial. To generate the tutorial system, a log obtaining function is added to the target application without modifying the source program. The log data of user’s operations are recorded. Operation flows in the target application are constructed and frequent operations are weighted. Then tutorials are generated and shown based on the weighting. Our method allows a user to view appropriate tutorials for the current status of the operation on a large display of a PC.