Almost no modern software system is written from scratch, and developers are required to effectively learn to use third-party libraries or software services. Thus, many practitioners and researchers have looked for ways to create effective documentation that supports developers' learning. However, few efforts have focused on how people actually use the documentation. In this paper, we report on an exploratory, multi-phase, mixed methods empirical study of documentation page-view logs from four cloud-based industrial services. By analyzing page-view logs for over 100,000 users, we find diverse patterns of documentation page visits. Moreover, we show statistically that which documentation pages people visit often correlates with user characteristics such as past experience with the specific product, on the one hand, and with future adoption of the API on the other hand. We discuss the implications of these results on documentation design and propose documentation page-view log analysis as a feasible technique for design audits of documentation, from ones written for software developers to ones designed to support end users (e.g., Adobe Photoshop).

翻译：几乎没有现代软件系统是从零开始编写的，开发人员必须有效学习使用第三方库或软件服务。因此，许多从业者和研究人员一直在寻找创建能支持开发人员学习的有效文档的方法。然而，很少有人关注人们实际如何使用文档。本文报告了一项针对四个云工业服务的文档页面浏览日志进行的探索性、多阶段、混合方法实证研究。通过分析超过10万用户的页面浏览日志，我们发现多样化的文档页面访问模式。此外，我们通过统计证明：人们访问哪些文档页面通常与用户特征（如特定产品的过往经验）相关，同时也与API的未来采用情况相关。我们讨论了这些结果对文档设计的启示，并提出了将文档页面浏览日志分析作为文档设计审计的可行技术——无论是为软件开发人员编写的文档，还是为支持最终用户（如Adobe Photoshop）而设计的文档均可适用。