There’s one document a marketing team can barely fake: the tutorial. A brochure can be written beautifully with zero input from the product. But a tutorial must show screens, name menus, and guide a real person’s hands — it can only be as good as the product it documents.
That’s why savvy software buyers read the tutorials before believing the feature pages. Here’s how to read them.
What a tutorial leaks about its product
Whether the product is real or still a promise. A feature with a tutorial is a feature that actually works — complete with screens and steps. A feature that exists only on the brochure but never appears in the docs deserves a question: is that a “coming soon” in disguise?
How honest the vendor is about hard cases. Any documentation can describe the happy path. What separates them: are there tutorials for the unpleasant cases — returns on unpaid invoices, cancelled repairs, drifting stock? A vendor who documents its users’ bad days is a vendor whose product has survived bad days.
How much the experience was designed. Tutorials in a learning order (start here, continue there), naming prerequisites, anticipating common mistakes — that signals a team that understands its users’ journey, not one ticking a documentation checkbox.
A concrete example of honest documentation
Compare two ways to document “data import”:
The brochure version: “Easy and fast Excel import!” — done, unverifiable.
The honest documentation version — showing even the part that isn’t smooth:
Documentation that dares to show error messages and how to handle them is saying: we know exactly what you’ll run into — and we got there first.
Auditing documentation in 10 minutes
- Find your core workflow — for a repair shop: unit in, through to handover. Is there a tutorial? Step-by-step?
- Find one ugly case — search “return”, “cancel”, “stock drift”. Found it? This vendor knows the real world.
- Check the screens — illustrated/animated docs showing the actual interface (not decorative icons) mean nothing is being hidden until the demo:
- Check the pulse — documentation updated alongside its product signals a product that’s alive.
The standard we set for ourselves
Since this article proposes a standard, it’s only fair to point at ours for auditing: the Automan tutorials hub — 30+ tutorials in learning order (from account creation to accounting), including the not-smooth cases, with interface scenes at each step. The originals are in Indonesian (our home market) with the English mirror rolling out — audit us with the same four steps; if a workflow of yours isn’t documented, that’s exactly the feedback we want.
And when comparing candidates, make this a habit: open the feature pages to learn the promise — open the tutorials to learn the reality. The gap between them is the most valuable information you can get for free. Full selection criteria live in the buying guide.