Do LLMs Meet the Needs of Software Tutorial Writers? Opportunities and Design Implications

Creating software tutorials involves developing accurate code examples and explanatory text that engages and informs the reader. Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate a strong capacity to generate both text and code, but their potential to assist tutorial writing is unknown. By interviewing and observing seven experienced writers using OpenAI playground as an exploration environment, we uncover design opportunities for leveraging LLMs in software tutorial writing. Our findings reveal background research, resource creation, and maintaining quality standards as critical areas where LLMs could significantly assist writers. We observe how tutorial writers generated tutorial content while exploring LLMs' capabilities, formulating prompts, verifying LLM outputs, and reflecting on interaction goals and strategies. Our observation highlights that the unpredictability of LLM outputs and unintuitive interface design contributed to skepticism about LLM's utility. Informed by these results, we contribute recommendations for designing LLM-based tutorial writing tools to mitigate usability challenges and harness LLMs' full potential.