Screencasts aka Video Tutorials in the Help Mix

Recently, Denise Kadilak wrapped up a series of blog posts that explored the cool help functionality we’re building into our next generation applications. To top it off, she just posted an excellent screencast on BBLabs that guides you through the nuts and bolts. If you’re not familiar with screencasts, they’re basically guided UI videos with audio narration.

A few members of the doc team, including Lindsey Robbins, Nikki Tremann and Denise have been exploring the possibilities of producing screencasts to publish along with our other help content. And as you can see from Denise’s example, the exploration was a success. Moving forward, we intend to use screencasts where it makes sense but we won’t overuse them. They’re effective at communicating in a visual way that'll benefit users trying to complete more complex processes… but they’re overkill for more intuitive tasks. We've also decided to call our screencasts "video tutorials," which clearly communicates the purpose to users who may be unfamiliar with the screencast terminology.

In the very near future we hope to have additional video tutorials to share… I know Nikki has a BBNC video tutorial in the works that covers processing individual sign-up requests in RE. Hopefully, we can publish that soon so you can take a look and let us know what you think. In the meantime, drop a comment and let us know what processes you'd like to see made into video tutorials.

BTW – We’re using Adobe Captivate to create our video tutorials.

UPDATE :: Nikki's BBNC video tutorial is posted here. You'll have to log in to view it.