TaggedComments: promoting and integrating user comments in online application tutorials.

User comments posted to popular online tutorials constitute a rich additional source of information for readers, yet current designs for displaying user comments on tutorial webpages do little to support their use. Instead, comments are separated from the tutorial content they reference and tend to be ordered according to post date. We propose and evaluate the TaggedComments system, a new approach to displaying comments that users post to online tutorials. Using tags supplied by commenters, TaggedComments seeks to enhance the role of user comments by 1) improving their visibility, 2) allowing users to personalize their use of the comments according to their particular information needs, and 3) providing direct access to potentially helpful comments from the tutorial content. A laboratory evaluation with 16 participants shows that, in comparison to the standard comment layout, TaggedComments significantly improves users' subjective impressions of comment utility when interacting with Photoshop tutorials.