Videos and screencasts have their drawbacks, too

20 Jan

Posted by Scott as documentation, opinion, screencasting

As I’ve written in this space in the past, if a picture is worth a thousand words then a short video or screencast can be worth a thousand pictures. And a well done video or screencast (or series of them) has the potential to ease a user through the maze of a new interface or device.

For the last year or so, I’ve heard more than a couple of people (no, Gordon, you’re not one of them) tout video and screencasts as the future of documentation. While video may have killed the radio star, I don’t think that it’s going to kill documentation as we know it.

Why? Not everyone wants video as their documentation, or even as part of their documentation. They want information now, and don’t want to wait a couple of minutes to watch a walk through of what they need to do.

There are other factors, too. Read on …

Seek and ye shall find

With more than just a little effort, though. With electronic documentation, you usually have a search feature. With printed documentation, there’s a table of contents and an index. Both help users find the information that they need (relatively) quickly. In many cases, you can also bookmark the information for later reference.

With video and screencasts, though, it’s not that easy. You can fast forward or scroll through the video, but you need to rely on visual cues and a little luck to get to the information that you want. Chances are, you’ll have to watch an extra few seconds of video to get there. It can be frustrating. It can slow down your workflow. And forget about bookmarking.

Convenience and availability

What happens if you’re offline? As someone pointed out in a comment on another post When the power goes out, print remains. The same thing applies to when you’re away from your computer.

Sure, you can take videos and screencasts portable on devices like a smartphone or a portable digital video player. While I’ve watched YouTube videos on my nephew’s iPod Touch and they’ve looked pretty good, I don’t fancy having to watch too many videos on such a small screen.

On top of that, there’s the constant dangers of 1) the device’s battery running down, 2) losing the device, and 3) getting a video that’s in a format that the device doesn’t support.

Translation

This isn’t a problem for all firms, but it can become one. Video and screencasts can add another layer of complexity to the whole process. Scripts for the videos and screencasts will need to be translated into the target languages. You might need to get sample data in those languages.

On top of that, you’ll need to do voiceovers in those languages. If you don’t have the linguistic talent in house, then those tasks need to be farmed out. Just watch your costs soar.

A personal example

Just to illustrate some of these drawbacks:

Last year, I got a BlackBerry smartphone. One of the first things that I did was buy a microSD card to expand the phone’s memory. Just for laughs, I decided to compare what was more effective: the printed instructions for inserting the card, or a video of the same by the folks at Crackberry.com. The video was just over three minutes long; it took me less than that to find the instructions that came with the phone and to install the microSD card.

It just goes to show that sometimes going old school can be faster and more efficient. And I wonder how easy or difficult it would have been to find similar videos in one of the several languages that I’ve failed to learn.

Summing up

Video and screencasts have their uses. In the short term, I doubt that they’re going to replace other forms of documentation. They’re definitely good forms of supplementary documentation, though.

What are your thoughts on this subject? Feel free to share those thoughts by leaving a comment.

Photo credit: TEA from photoXpress.com