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FacebookWhy Is It Important for Video Tutorials to Be User-Led?
November 13th, 2009 | Posted in Screencasting 9 Comments »
I recently spent 10 days in Florida visiting my family and giving a couple of presentations to the STC-Suncoast and STC-Orlando chapters on blogging. You can hardly take a family of kids to Florida without going to Disneyworld and Seaworld, so we did that as well.
In case you’re unaware of the cost of theme parks, prices are enough to bring on a cold sweat and tremor. (Thanks to some friends, one park was free.) After we completed our four day theme park immersion (Seaworld x 2, Disneyworld, and Busch Gardens), we took life a little more slowly and went to the Fort DeSoto beach.
While my kids were digging in sand and collecting seashells, I dared to ask whether they would rather spend a day at the beach or a day at Disneyworld.
Their answer? Unanimously, they said the beach. I even asked them multiple times on different occasions. Always the same answer: the beach, Dad. We would rather go to the beach and collect seashells.
The interesting question is why. Why do kids prefer the beach to Disneyworld? I think the answer is wrapped up in the phrase “child-led.”
What child-led means
My sister is a proponent of child-led parenting. I was first introduced to the idea when we went on a walk along a trail near Timpanogos Cave in Utah. Rather than pull her kids along or push them in a stroller, my sister preferred to follow her children, allowing them to explore what they wanted and go at their own pace. Given that she has a one and three year old, we moved at about .01 miles per hour.
She later added that child-led parenting doesn’t mean you let your children do whatever they want without rules. Instead, her model of child-led parenting is to allow the children to make decisions and determine their course of action by themselves (to some extent).
Some examples of non-child-led activities might be letting your children watch TV or parading them around rides at a theme park. In both cases, the child is floored by the external stimuli, not making decisions on his or her own but rather sitting back and letting someone else drive the input and thought.
In contrast, on the beach, the activity is much more child-led. The child drives the activity all the way, deciding where to dig in the sand, how deep, whether to build a castle or not. The child decides whether to wade deep or shallow in the water, to run from waves or into waves, whether to dance around or stand still. The child decides what seashells to collect, how many to put in his or her bucket, how to arrange them, which ones to keep, and so on.
In child-led activities, the child makes a ton of decisions about how he or she wants to do an activity. The activity doesn’t drive the child. The child’s choices drive the activity.
If child-led activities are more engaging to children than other types of activities, is there such a thing as user-led documentation? Most written documentation is more or less user-led, because the user must decide which topic to read, how long to read it, and how to navigate the content.
But when it comes to video tutorials, long narrations quickly tire the audience. Why is that? The same reason my kids prefer the beach over Disneyworld: most videos are not user-led.
Should cinema be the focus?
I recently read a good post by Brooks Andrus on combining cinematography with video tutorials. He mentioned incorporating a variety of cinematic techniques to keep the audience’s attention. Brooks writes,
How can we make screencasts more engaging? What can we learn from the masters of visual literacy, cinematographers, about pacing, depth, emotion and visual narrative? These sorts of questions are important to explore if we want people to engage with, learn from and, dare I say, enjoy our screencasts. That’s the mindset I think we need to establish for screencasting. We’re not just recording the screen, we’re telling a story and there is a well established historical record of the art and science behind motion picture narratives.
I agree with Brooks on the importance of story. And I certainly welcome the integration of cinema with screencasting. But no matter how good you make the video — even if you make the video as cool as a Disneyworld ride — your viewer is still going to be bored if the video is not user-led.
The direction we should take with video, then, is not so much moving into the domain of cinema. It should be to make the videos a user-led experience.
Some concrete ideas
Exactly how does one make a user-led video? Here are a few ideas that come to mind.
- Present the user with learning options in the middle of the video (branching).
- Provide users with a let-me-try experience at the end of the video.
- Keep the videos short (30 seconds to 2 minutes) so that you allow the user to click and watch the segment of the video he or she wants.
- Require the user to perform some actions during the video or at the end (like homework).
- Make the videos into more of a choose-your-own adventure.
- Provide periodic quizzes during the video.
User-led is a concept that I’m going to be thinking more about in the upcoming months as I create videos for my documentation projects. If you have any tips or thoughts on creating more of a user-led experience, please let me know.
Tags: brooks andrus, child led, cinema, engagement, video tutorials
Interesting post, Tom!
Video tutorials are becoming increasingly important these days.
I had a chance to work on some tutorials/demos in my project and since it was related to a networking workflow, the length of the video was around 8-10 minutes. We used the TOC option available in Camtasia and inserted a few markers which allowed the user to navigate within the diffent sections of the video.
~Sujith
Sujith, thanks for the tips about using the table of contents as a user-led option. I like the TOC as well, but it tends to make the video screen really wide.
Great post. Since I live in this world of video a lot, I got some thoughts.
There’s another practical example of child-led learning; “Blue’s Clues”. Blue’s Clues was the first public television program to do the whole “what do you think” long pause thing. It tries (among other techniques) to give children an opportunity to engage. Even if the child doesn’t ‘vocalize’ the response, their studies have shown that the pause causes children to try and answer the question. This is good, because the child (especially with a video) doesn’t know what they’re going to learn. They tune in because there’s something new to discover.
You didn’t mention whether your children had been to a Disneyland theme park before (although my hunch is they’ve been to Lagoon), but my guess is that they’ve never been to a white sandy beach. They wanted something completely new. You, on the other hand, have probably been to a beach and know what to expect.
Children excel in child-led learning environments (Montessori is a good example) because they are essentially sponges and are trying desperately to build a huge index of context and knowledge that we take for granted as adults (because we were child/sponges once too, but are under the effects of “the curse of knowledge”).
The problem is, this “user-led” learning method technically falls apart with adults when used inside of a video. Andragogy states there are some basic premises that should be considered when teaching adults. One thing to consider is that adults are self-directed in their learning, sometimes to a fault. We act more like spoiled children when it comes to learning something (i.e. “I know what I want, so give it to me now!”) So, it’s not so much that a video must be user-led as much as it should be user-desirable.
Here’s a nice little chart talking about andragogy vs pedagogy:
http://screencast.com/t/ZjAxOWRhMjEt
Now, what happens with branching and mid-video quizzes with adults is they get frustrated. They want information, not teaching/testing (ironic?). They already made the choice to watch the video, so they don’t want to be graded; getting the job done is the grade. They’re already become “user-led” before the video started. So, although engagement is important and story telling helps improve retention, taking assessment of an adult learner during encoding (receiving of the information) can be distracting.
So, how’s that for reading between the lines? Did I get any of my assumptions right?
Chris, thanks for your insight here. I hadn’t thought about the differences in learning styles between children and adults, but you’re right. That’s an assumption I overlooked.
Before Utah, we actually lived in Florida, so my kids are familiar with beaches. Lines weren’t that long at Disneyworld, and they did enjoy it.
Back to adult versus child learning, I agree that adults are much more self-directed in selecting what they want to learn.
Maybe my compromise will be to keep the videos short (under a minute if possible), remembering that it’s a somewhat passive learning activity.
I do sometimes get frustrated with the whole let-me-try videos, or quizzing. Those techniques can be annoying.
However, when I was learning Visio, I watched a bunch of videos, and one of the most useful things was a homework-type assignment at the end of each video. Here’s a link that.
I’ve been going cinematic on some of my videos, but their purpose isn’t to answer questions – it’s to show people parts of the program they might not know about and to stimulate interest. Instead of saying “come learn more about Visio even if you already know how to make flowcharts” I’m trying to catch their attention, and then hopefully get them to continue watching because it’s fun. Here’s the first of the three episodes I’ve finished so far; the others are also on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtgYTWRdTSU&hd=1
Harry, those are really engaging videos. I just watched all three of them. You’re getting a lot more adept at film, and I’m wondering how you did all of those special effects. Really cool stuff — thanks for sharing it with me. Do you have a post you’ve written where you describe your technique? Totally mesmerizing and good acting, voice, and light too.
Harry: Great work. Really interesting story to merge the two worlds (live action and screencasting). I’m impressed.
Thanks! I’m fortunate that one of the writers for Word has a theater background, so I can concentrate on the camera and production and he does a great job with the acting. I film Ron (Clarity) in front of a green wall I have in my office, then key him into a 3D set I constructed in After Effects using parts that I drew in Visio (to keep it looking authentic
Yeah, I should write a post and put up some pictures of the process.
The basic idea came together from my love of film noir style, and trying to think of how I could create a narrative that would explain why someone uses Visio a lot in a variety of situations. They do it on TV all the time – David Banner turned into the Hulk every week, and Kwai Chang Caine had to unleash the Kung Fu every week in spite of his pacificist nature.
They had to, or people would lose interest and stop watching.
Harry, thanks for expanding on your technique. If you would ever like to write a guest post on my blog about your techniques, let me know, as I would be happy to see more detail. I haven’t worked with green walls yet. But recently I saw a review by David Pogue of Yoostar software. Apparently this software allows you to easily insert yourself into about 20 different movies. If you haven’t seen it, you might want to check it out, as it looks like something that may be of interest to you.
By the way, Harry Clarity is a great, fun-to-watch actor. I noticed that he really seemed professional. And I like his character.