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Re: Effective use of video in software tutorials?

Subject: Re: Effective use of video in software tutorials?
From: "Peter Neilson" <neilson -at- windstream -dot- net>
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Date: Sat, 31 Mar 2012 07:13:17 -0400

On Fri, 30 Mar 2012 22:27:18 -0400, Keith Purtell
<keithpurtell -at- keithpurtell -dot- com> wrote:

... [no] full start-to-finish video. So my question is, what are some suggestions for the criteria I develop to decide what parts of my documentation would be best supplemented by video?

Start by studying existing software tutorial videos you can find on
YouTube. Examine the really bad ones, and then anti-emulate them. There is
a tendency of the producer to believe that showing stuff on video makes it
transparently obvious.

The video narrator knows where he is going to move the cursor, but the
viewer does not. Thus a script like this one is especially annoying:

As you can see [NO, I CAN'T. WHERE?] we've got the frobnatz here. So we
just move over here [WHERE?] and right-click to bring up the, oops, we
didn't get it. There. It's docked to the left side. I hope it's not off
your video. [WHAT IS IT? YOU NEVER SAID A NAME. WHY DO WE NEED IT?] So we
just enter the number from before [I DIDN'T SEE THAT. WHAT NUMBER? WHERE?]
and click over here [LIKE, WHERE?] and we're done. Next we'll show how to
use it in the gazoing-ploot.

dd if=/dev/narrator/mind of=/dev/null

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References:
Effective use of video in software tutorials?: From: Keith Purtell

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