  The better developers can learn software tools, the faster they can start
using them and the more efficiently they can later work with them. Tutorials
are supposed to help here. While in the early days of computing, mostly text
tutorials were available, nowadays software developers can choose among a huge
number of tutorials for almost any popular software tool. However, only little
research was conducted to understand how text tutorials differ from other
tutorials, which tutorial types are preferred and, especially, which tutorial
types yield the best learning experience in terms of efficiency and
effectiveness, especially for programmers. To evaluate these questions, we
converted an existing video tutorial for a novel software tool into a
content-equivalent text tutorial. We then conducted an experiment in three
groups where 42 undergraduate students from a software engineering course were
commissioned to operate the software tool after using a tutorial: the first
group was provided only with the video tutorial, the second group only with the
text tutorial and the third group with both. In this context, the differences
in terms of efficiency were almost negligible: We could observe that
participants using only the text tutorial completed the tutorial faster than
the participants with the video tutorial. However, the participants using only
the video tutorial applied the learned content faster, achieving roughly the
same bottom line performance. We also found that if both tutorial types are
offered, participants prefer video tutorials for learning new content but text
tutorials for looking up "missed" information. We mainly gathered our data
through questionnaires and screen recordings and analyzed it with suitable
statistical hypotheses tests. The data is available at [12]. Since producing
tutorials requires effort, knowing with which type of tutorial learnability can
be increased to which extent has an immense practical relevance. We conclude
that in contexts similar to ours, while it would be ideal if software tool
makers would offer both tutorial types, it seems more efficient to produce only
text tutorials instead of a passive video tutorial - provided you manage to
motivate your learners to use them.
