Video as Help
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I was involved in a few bits of research after the attempts to do this with live video had turned into nice little disasters and I found something that's quite useful once you understand the interface: Demo-builder 7 from these guys over on http://demo-builder.com/[^] It allows you to do record your actions as you work through a program, at changes in the interface it takes a screen capture minus the cursor, which it animates in it's own system which you can completely change to suit your needs. You can toss in text boxes, audio, or make it interactive with buttons all of which are used to create a flash file. If you're doing it for internal training purposes they also have a quiz builder which is pretty nice and can be easily integrated with .net so long as you are careful certain configurations of it. It was pretty handy and I wound up writing an application around it for delivery of the flash files it produces to customers and new employees. For me it beat the attempts at getting the 'perfect' screen capture which always varies from manager to manager, you record it once, and then animate the cursor however they want it, add in little messages, and get the entire lesson covered with having to edit 'ohh' and 'uhh' out of the audio.
Distind wrote:
Looks good!
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I think Google did it before they released Chrome. Personally, I thought they were aimed at idiots. Anyway, who needs help these days with anything that is not a software bug?
Remember it is not a bug it is a feature. :laugh:
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How many of you have been shipping or providing Videos on how to perform tasks in your applications? How have the users responded to it? Also do you hire professionals to do the voice overs? I see that it is a growing trend now. Though personally I don't prefer videos as they take lot of time over reading. However, I see some people actually like it. One thing is certain, very few users actually read the help file or documents. But is the investment on videos actually worth in providing user education?
Videos tend to be paced slowly to carry the reader. I want to read, fast, to find the answer and move on. I really don't care about the irrelevant fluff that comes with a presentation. If a picture is worth a 1000 words and video is recorded at 30fps I am basically perusing through 9,000,000 words in a five minute video without a text search feature to quickly find the one sentence that describes exactly what I need. No thanks.
Need custom software developed? I do C# development and consulting all over the United States. A man said to the universe: "Sir I exist!" "However," replied the universe, "The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation." --Stephen Crane
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Videos tend to be paced slowly to carry the reader. I want to read, fast, to find the answer and move on. I really don't care about the irrelevant fluff that comes with a presentation. If a picture is worth a 1000 words and video is recorded at 30fps I am basically perusing through 9,000,000 words in a five minute video without a text search feature to quickly find the one sentence that describes exactly what I need. No thanks.
Need custom software developed? I do C# development and consulting all over the United States. A man said to the universe: "Sir I exist!" "However," replied the universe, "The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation." --Stephen Crane
Obviously, your points are all true. But I was asking about users of the software you develop.
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peterchen wrote:
We opted against audio and use text screens and subtitles instead.
Phew! I was expecting it to be in Chinese. I am not sure whether I really like silent movies. But probably it is useful when I want to actually know how things need to be done.
Rama Krishna Vavilala wrote:
Phew! I was expecting it to be in Chinese.
Eh!
Rama Krishna Vavilala wrote:
I am not sure whether I really like silent movies.
OK, what about "easier to watch in a shared office"? :D At the end, it is a compromise, but I find it a rather good one. If you want to capture your audience emotionally, transfer emotions rather than (or with the) facts, or if you target the MTV crowd, it is virtually impossible to go without audio nowadays (but then, IMO you will need voice actors or someone suitably talented).
Don't attribute to stupidity what can be equally well explained by buerocracy.
My latest article | Linkify!| FoldWithUs! | sighist -
Rama Krishna Vavilala wrote:
Phew! I was expecting it to be in Chinese.
Eh!
Rama Krishna Vavilala wrote:
I am not sure whether I really like silent movies.
OK, what about "easier to watch in a shared office"? :D At the end, it is a compromise, but I find it a rather good one. If you want to capture your audience emotionally, transfer emotions rather than (or with the) facts, or if you target the MTV crowd, it is virtually impossible to go without audio nowadays (but then, IMO you will need voice actors or someone suitably talented).
Don't attribute to stupidity what can be equally well explained by buerocracy.
My latest article | Linkify!| FoldWithUs! | sighistpeterchen wrote:
"easier to watch in a shared office"?
Makes sense. Your video does it's job. I was just thinking whether I will like a video without audio. I reminded myself that these videos are more for instructional purposes and not for entertainment.
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How many of you have been shipping or providing Videos on how to perform tasks in your applications? How have the users responded to it? Also do you hire professionals to do the voice overs? I see that it is a growing trend now. Though personally I don't prefer videos as they take lot of time over reading. However, I see some people actually like it. One thing is certain, very few users actually read the help file or documents. But is the investment on videos actually worth in providing user education?
Apple have videos to demonstrate multi-touch features of the trackpad on MacBooks and MacBook Pros. I'm not sure they're displayed in quite the right place (they're displayed on the trackpad preferences pane), or maybe they should be in the help as well. Having said that, a video's much better than a text description for showing how you drag with a single finger tap on a trackpad...
Java, Basic, who cares - it's all a bunch of tree-hugging hippy cr*p
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Apple have videos to demonstrate multi-touch features of the trackpad on MacBooks and MacBook Pros. I'm not sure they're displayed in quite the right place (they're displayed on the trackpad preferences pane), or maybe they should be in the help as well. Having said that, a video's much better than a text description for showing how you drag with a single finger tap on a trackpad...
Java, Basic, who cares - it's all a bunch of tree-hugging hippy cr*p
Stuart Dootson wrote:
Apple have videos to demonstrate multi-touch features of the trackpad on MacBooks and MacBook Pros.
Yes. I forgot about that. That has been the most helpful video I have seen so far.
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Videos tend to be paced slowly to carry the reader. I want to read, fast, to find the answer and move on. I really don't care about the irrelevant fluff that comes with a presentation. If a picture is worth a 1000 words and video is recorded at 30fps I am basically perusing through 9,000,000 words in a five minute video without a text search feature to quickly find the one sentence that describes exactly what I need. No thanks.
Need custom software developed? I do C# development and consulting all over the United States. A man said to the universe: "Sir I exist!" "However," replied the universe, "The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation." --Stephen Crane
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I think Google did it before they released Chrome. Personally, I thought they were aimed at idiots. Anyway, who needs help these days with anything that is not a software bug?
Emil - Gabriel wrote:
I thought they were aimed at idiots
And you would be right.... that is my user base :-)
Why is common sense not common? Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level where they are an expert. Sometimes it takes a lot of work to be lazy Individuality is fine, as long as we do it together - F. Burns Help humanity, join the CodeProject grid computing team here
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Distind wrote:
Looks good!
you could also look at Wink http://www.debugmode.com/wink/[^] which is free.
Why is common sense not common? Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level where they are an expert. Sometimes it takes a lot of work to be lazy Individuality is fine, as long as we do it together - F. Burns Help humanity, join the CodeProject grid computing team here
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Remember it is not a bug it is a feature. :laugh:
djj55 wrote:
Remember it is not a bug it is a feature
No, it's a video! :-D At best, it's a trailer.
Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.”
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Mustafa Ismail Mustafa wrote:
t cuts down training time
That might convince me.
That was my primary reason for implementing it the first time. After that, it just turned out that the end users prefer video, so long as the first time the video if introduced, its in a training environment. You can stand there like post and not say a word as the video plays (we use silent videos with captions using Camtasia studio). After that, you just watch the users do it. Monkey see, monkey do ;)
If the post was helpful, please vote, eh! Current activities: Book: Devils by Fyodor Dostoyevsky Project: Hospital Automation, final stage Learning: Image analysis, LINQ Now and forever, defiant to the end. What is Multiple Sclerosis[^]?
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How many of you have been shipping or providing Videos on how to perform tasks in your applications? How have the users responded to it? Also do you hire professionals to do the voice overs? I see that it is a growing trend now. Though personally I don't prefer videos as they take lot of time over reading. However, I see some people actually like it. One thing is certain, very few users actually read the help file or documents. But is the investment on videos actually worth in providing user education?
Don't know how useful they are, but if you do them, have them done professionally, especially the voices. My current company "rolled their own" and they are embarrassingly bad. Then again, I not only have a degree in film production, I ran my own company for five years that produced edutainment software and media content (I wrote, produced, directed and edited content as well as designed and wrote software) and I did several contracts for voice work (unless they've changed it, if you buy a ticket on the San Diego trolley or San Jose light rail and select to have the audio read to you, I produced that!) BTW, I once interviewed a company that produced training videos. What still annoys me about them is that their visual content was top notch, but their voice work was hideous. The videos they actually sold had pauses and "ums" in them. It was also recorded very badly--it had echo and lacked bass. Same thing happened at Novell--they spent a lot of money on some great content only to add in terrible actors and voice talent. (In both cases, I strongly suspect people were hiring friends and relatives, not seasoned professionals.)
modified on Wednesday, July 8, 2009 4:47 PM
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Don't know how useful they are, but if you do them, have them done professionally, especially the voices. My current company "rolled their own" and they are embarrassingly bad. Then again, I not only have a degree in film production, I ran my own company for five years that produced edutainment software and media content (I wrote, produced, directed and edited content as well as designed and wrote software) and I did several contracts for voice work (unless they've changed it, if you buy a ticket on the San Diego trolley or San Jose light rail and select to have the audio read to you, I produced that!) BTW, I once interviewed a company that produced training videos. What still annoys me about them is that their visual content was top notch, but their voice work was hideous. The videos they actually sold had pauses and "ums" in them. It was also recorded very badly--it had echo and lacked bass. Same thing happened at Novell--they spent a lot of money on some great content only to add in terrible actors and voice talent. (In both cases, I strongly suspect people were hiring friends and relatives, not seasoned professionals.)
modified on Wednesday, July 8, 2009 4:47 PM
Personally I don't see how having a voice over or an actor shown in a technical assistance video does anything but detract. I completely understand it in sales oriented videos when you're trying to convince someone of something but in a technical assistance video I see no benefit and only downsides to having a voiceover or actor appearance.
"Creating your own blog is about as easy as creating your own urine, and you're about as likely to find someone else interested in it." -- Lore Sjöberg
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Personally I don't see how having a voice over or an actor shown in a technical assistance video does anything but detract. I completely understand it in sales oriented videos when you're trying to convince someone of something but in a technical assistance video I see no benefit and only downsides to having a voiceover or actor appearance.
"Creating your own blog is about as easy as creating your own urine, and you're about as likely to find someone else interested in it." -- Lore Sjöberg
I'm not convinced of the benefit, but IF you make such a thing, it's best to have it done right. (One thing I hate about Microsoft's channel 9 is listening to people "um", "er" and "well" their way through a fifteen minute presentation that could have taken five.)
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Don't know how useful they are, but if you do them, have them done professionally, especially the voices. My current company "rolled their own" and they are embarrassingly bad. Then again, I not only have a degree in film production, I ran my own company for five years that produced edutainment software and media content (I wrote, produced, directed and edited content as well as designed and wrote software) and I did several contracts for voice work (unless they've changed it, if you buy a ticket on the San Diego trolley or San Jose light rail and select to have the audio read to you, I produced that!) BTW, I once interviewed a company that produced training videos. What still annoys me about them is that their visual content was top notch, but their voice work was hideous. The videos they actually sold had pauses and "ums" in them. It was also recorded very badly--it had echo and lacked bass. Same thing happened at Novell--they spent a lot of money on some great content only to add in terrible actors and voice talent. (In both cases, I strongly suspect people were hiring friends and relatives, not seasoned professionals.)
modified on Wednesday, July 8, 2009 4:47 PM
Joe Woodbury wrote:
, but if you do them, have them done professionally, especially the voices.
That is what my impression was when I first posted my question. But most people seem to have employed low tech and low budget means and have been satisfied with it as it worked.
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Joe Woodbury wrote:
, but if you do them, have them done professionally, especially the voices.
That is what my impression was when I first posted my question. But most people seem to have employed low tech and low budget means and have been satisfied with it as it worked.
Rama Krishna Vavilala wrote:
But most people seem to have employed low tech and low budget means
Professional doesn't mean high budget. Professional actors are not that expensive and with proper planning, you can keep those expenses to a minimum.
Rama Krishna Vavilala wrote:
and have been satisfied with it as it worked
No, they are deluded with the result. I'll bet these same people are satisfied with a manual that is full of misspellings, grammatical errors and poor formatting and with programs that have lots of bugs and a poorly designed interface. In my experience "it worked" means the boss liked it, not the customer.
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Rama Krishna Vavilala wrote:
But most people seem to have employed low tech and low budget means
Professional doesn't mean high budget. Professional actors are not that expensive and with proper planning, you can keep those expenses to a minimum.
Rama Krishna Vavilala wrote:
and have been satisfied with it as it worked
No, they are deluded with the result. I'll bet these same people are satisfied with a manual that is full of misspellings, grammatical errors and poor formatting and with programs that have lots of bugs and a poorly designed interface. In my experience "it worked" means the boss liked it, not the customer.
Makes sense. I agree with you. At least the most important videos should be done professionally.
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Videos tend to be paced slowly to carry the reader. I want to read, fast, to find the answer and move on. I really don't care about the irrelevant fluff that comes with a presentation. If a picture is worth a 1000 words and video is recorded at 30fps I am basically perusing through 9,000,000 words in a five minute video without a text search feature to quickly find the one sentence that describes exactly what I need. No thanks.
Need custom software developed? I do C# development and consulting all over the United States. A man said to the universe: "Sir I exist!" "However," replied the universe, "The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation." --Stephen Crane
Yeah but you are not the target for this stuff - I may consider it for MY users based on this discussion. What especially interests me is the low cost of introducing a new user, churn of staff in a specialised area is costly.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH