Re: how useful are video tutorials/screencasts?

[kafkascampi <kafkascampi -at- gmail -dot- com>]

Phil asked: "Do you make these for your audiences? What kind of reaction do
you get (I'm happy to garner informal, anecdotal feedback from professionals
at this point, but if you do have statistical/empirical evidence, please
feel free to throw it out my way)?"

In our last software release (we are SaaS), I added embedded flash videos to
the help topics that get the most views. I placed them at the end of the
topics, with a "Show me how" link at the beginning of the topic to hop
straight down to the video. In my Webhelp, I also have a "videos section
that has those same videos as stand-alone topics with no text--but all
context-sensitive links go to the text with video topic, not the video-only.
All the videos are single-task focused and vary between 1 and 3 minutes.
Users can watch them in teenyvision or click the video to go fullscreen.

As to our process, I write the script and then record the video using
Screenflow for the Mac. Then our training person does the audio from my
script, as my voice is, to put it kindly, sort of dull. We store the vids on
a server and I embed them in my DITA XML topics as objects.

We have had nothing but positive feedback so far--some users like to watch
videos and some don't. Embedding them in the topic gives the user the choice
to watch or not. We've also added Google tracking code to monitor how many
views each video gets.

Chris



On Wed, Aug 17, 2011 at 8:50 AM, Gene Kim-Eng <techwr -at- genek -dot- com> wrote:

> I'm with you on this.  Videos can be useful for demonstrating how to do
> some
> complex mechanical tasks, but it annoys the hell out of me to click on a
> link that should be leading to a words-and-picture procedure that I could
> read in 30 seconds and have it go to a four-minute YouTube video.
>
> Gene Kim-Eng
>
>
> On Wed, Aug 17, 2011 at 5:13 AM, Phil Stokes <philstokes03 -at- googlemail -dot- com
> >wrote:
>
> > Equally, I'm interested in your gut-feeling as a user about these. I use
> > video tutorials for some students in my teaching work, but oddly I don't
> > like using them myself. Recent example: looking for a quick procedure for
> > installing an OS on an external drive, and the first three Google hits
> were
> > Youtube vids. I don't want to watch a video; its too time consuming both
> as
> > an experience and in terms of wasting processor time compared to loading
> a
> > simple blog page with step 1 to 5 in text.
> >
> >
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