Videos in Documentation [was RE: All sorts of other topics]

[Chris Despopoulos <despopoulos_chriss -at- yahoo -dot- com>]

I always thought you could quantify the worth of video in documentation.  Well, you would need to quantify the cognitive load for a person reading a text, which I guess is a bit far off in the horizon. But let's say you can.  Then you should be able to factor the number of bits for a message against the cognitive load and determine whether a visual message is worth it.  Intuitively, that approach can tell you quickly whether to add a graphic to your page...  You can imagine the graphic vs the analogous text, and see the threshold pretty easily.  We all do that when we seriously think about whether and how to add a graphic.  It's possible to add graphics gratuitously (I know I have), but when we really think about them, then somewhere in there I believe we're noting that threshold and leading readers to the better side of it.

I think the same approach can hold for video and animation.  Nothing bothers me more than having to watch an animated cursor crawl to a menu, crawl down the menu to the proper pick, and then hover over that menu pick until the slowest reader in the room can read it.  Just give me a still of the menu pick, for crying out loud.  In fact, for most technical animations, stop-action would probably be an improvement over full-frame movement.  In the end, the number of bits devoted to moving that cursor around exceeds the value of moving the cursor around.

One thing you would have to divide the value of an animation by, is the value of -- oh, what to call it -- syntaxis?  The ability to parse a textual statement at varying levels, separate syntactic units, and recombine them in different ways.  Sort of the whole reason we use text in the first place (aside from memory prosthetics)...  The ability of text to collapse experience into a coded message that contains far fewer bits (for lack of a better word) of information than the infinity of any given real-world moment yields the ability to focus, to guide focus, and to vary focus.  This gives us a tool for the combination of concepts -- choose focal units and order them as you wish.  Anyway, if you get value X out of your animation, you should consider value Y of the textual corollary, and S where S is the value of the syntaxis of Y.  Then only use an animation if X/S > Y.  Something like that...

cud



      
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