Social CheatSheet - An Interactive Community-Curated Information Overlay for Web Applications

Oct 14, 2026

Social CheatSheet provides an application-independent overlay that surfaces community-curated, step-by-step help for feature-rich web applications. Users can search, browse, filter, and bookmark instruction content, and ask questions with clarifications based on the collected material. The system also includes embedded curation tools enabling private or shared annotated notes and tutorials. A weeklong deployment with 15 users found it useful, with most participants choosing to continue using it.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryPresentations

FormatPDF

Pages19

Reading Time7 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Problem: Finding relevant web application help

Proposed approach: Social CheatSheet overlay

Community curation and embedded note-taking

Deployment study and user feedback

Social CheatSheet: An Interactive Community-Curated Information Overlay for Web Applications LATON VERMETTE, Simon Fraser University SHRUTI DEMBLA, University of Waterloo APRIL Y. WANG, Simon Fraser University JOANNA MCGRENERE, University of British Columbia PARMIT K. CHILANA, Simon Fraser University Users can often find it difficult to sift through dense help pages, tutorials, Q&A sites, blogs, and wikis to locate useful task-specific instructions for feature-rich applications. We present Social CheatSheet, an interactive information overlay that can appear atop any existing web application and retrieve relevant step-by-step instructions and tutorials curated by other users. Based on results of our formative study, the system offers several features for users to search, browse, filter, and bookmark community-generated help content and to ask questions and clarifications. Furthermore, Social CheatSheet includes embedded curation features for users to generate their own annotated notes and tutorials that can be kept private or shared with the user community. A weeklong deployment study with 15 users showed that users found Social CheatSheet to be useful and they were able to easily both add their own curated content and locate content generated by other users. The majority of users wanted to keep using the system beyond the deployment. We discuss the potential of Social CheatSheet as an application-independent platform driven by community curation efforts to lower the barriers in finding relevant help and instructions. CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Social content sharing; • Human-centered computing → Collaborative content creation; • Human-centered computing → Social recommendation KEYWORDS Community-curated help; social help; software learning; software help; ACM Reference format: Laton Vermette, Shruti Dembla, April Y. Wang, Joanna McGrenere, and Parmit K. Chilana. 2017. Social CheatSheet: An Interactive Community-Curated Information Overlay for Web Applications. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., 1, CSCW, Article 102 (November 2017), 19 pages. [https://doi.org/10.1145/3134737](https://doi.org/10.1145/3134737) 1 INTRODUCTION Using an unfamiliar feature-rich application can often be daunting for users. Although the web offers thousands of help resources, locating the most relevant and useful instructions and examples pertinent to atask can be frustrating and time-consuming. Instead of sifting through verbose documentation, lengthy text and video tutorials, blogs, wikis and other help pages, many users instead prefer social forms of help, such Author emails: Laton Vermette ([lvermett@sfu.ca](lvermett@sfu.ca)), Shruti Dembla ([s2dembla@uwaterloo.ca](s2dembla@uwaterloo.ca)), April Y. Wang ([ayw7@sfu.ca](ayw7@sfu.ca)), Joanna McGrenere ([joanna@cs.ubc.ca](joanna@cs.ubc.ca)), Parmit K. Chilana ([pchilana@cs.sfu.ca](pchilana@cs.sfu.ca)) Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions [from permissions@acm.org](from permissions@acm.org). 2573-0142/2017/11-ART102 $15.00 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s) . Publication rights licensed to ACM. [https://doi.org/10.1145/3134737](https://doi.org/10.1145/3134737) PACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 1, No. CSCW, Article 102. Publication date: November 2017. Fig. 1. Social CheatSheet’s expanded “grid” view shows all relevant curated notes and tutorials. Users can (1) easily add their own curated notes or tutorials, as well as filter c

FAQs

What problem does Social CheatSheet address for users of web applications?

Users often struggle to sift through dense help resources to find task-specific, useful instructions and examples. Social CheatSheet focuses on retrieving relevant step-by-step tutorials curated by other users.

How does Social CheatSheet help users find and manage community content?

Users can search, browse, filter, and bookmark community-generated help content. They can also sort and narrow results using tags, natural language search, learning preferences, and expertise level.

What curation capabilities does Social CheatSheet provide to users?

Social CheatSheet lets users create annotated notes and tutorials using embedded curation features. Content can be kept private or shared with the user community.

Oct 14, 2026

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