I'd Rather Be Writing » videos

A Few Notes from Usability Testing: Video Tutorials Get Watched, Text Gets Skipped

Tom Johnson — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 15:09:56 +0000

This week was the first time I’ve actually seen our usability labs used. We have a new usability research group led by someone with years of experience doing usability engineering for Microsoft. I watched in our observation room as he led a handful of users through 60-90 minute usability tests for an application I documented.

What is surprising about usability testing is how much valid information you can gather from so few subjects. With a handful of people unfamiliar with an app who are thoroughly trying to use it, you can find out most of the major problems with the app.

As the usability researcher asked participants to perform various tasks, eventually the participants forayed into the help. I was eagerly waiting for them to click the help icon, and when they did, I was a bit surprised what happened.

New Users Watch Videos, Skip Text

Only a few of the users read the help. Most just watched the videos. Keep in mind that all of the users were brand new to the app.

With one user, he didn’t realize there were videos at all, as I had them buried in a side option called “screencasts.” Screencasts seemed something similar to screen sharing, he said, so he didn’t click there until later. When he did, he felt that the videos were just what he was looking for in help material.

Another user watched one of the videos twice, and after watching the video, was somewhat successful in completing a task (or at least a lot more successful than before — there were still challenges).

Given the popularity of the videos, I soon stuck all five of the videos right on the home page. Here’s the introductory video that most people watched:

(You can view the rest of the videos here, by the way.)

Intermediate Users Skip Videos, Scan Text

Despite the popularity of the videos, I found that videos appeal to different users in different contexts. For more tech savvy users just looking for an answer to a specific question, they were less likely to watch a video and more likely to search/scan the text for answers to their specific questions. Even so, these intermediate users were interested and encouraged by the videos available and sometimes watched one. One user saw the Youtube logo on the videos and immediately said, Cool.

I also noticed that when users did venture into the text, they tended to discover information they hadn’t anticipated. I found this fascinating. I’ve written before that search doesn’t allow you to discover what you aren’t aware of. Most users seemed pretty confident that they already knew how most of the app worked. When they actually read the help, though, there was a lot they didn’t know.

The Help Paradox

Almost invariably, users tried to figure the app out themselves from the interface first before resorting to the help — especially advanced users. In watching users play guessing games, proceed with trial-and-error mentality, and generally click everywhere trying to figure things out, I realized it would have been easier if they viewed several tutorials first before trying to complete the tasks.

One of my colleagues explained that at one company, they did usability testing that involved a laptop, mouse, keyboard, and a 40 page quick reference guide. Of about a dozen users, one person read the entire guide before doing the tests. When this user started on the tests, he moved right through the tasks quickly.

We know this is probably true of software usage. It’s more efficient to read up on how to use the application first before diving into it. Despite this, most of us will resist help until the last resort, and turn to it only when we get stuck. We’ll struggle and struggle and struggle and only after spending 30 minutes or more guessing, then we’ll read the instructions for 5 minutes to figure it out.

One reason, my colleague explained, is that we need a certain context before information in a help file or video becomes relevant. Without having seen the app and wondered, for example, about the use of tags, a video called “About Tags” doesn’t become relevant.

Perhaps on-screen text that contains snippets of instruction, with links to more information in the help, would be a way to move people from the interface into the help.

What’s the Value of Writing?

Overall, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from watching users, it’s that they prefer video tutorials to text — especially new users. Having come to this conclusion about video, it makes me wonder whether I should be focusing more on video than writing. Maybe I have to reevaluate the importance of written communication? My blog is called, after all, I’d rather be writing. Shouldn’t I change it to something like, I’d rather be creating videos?

One limitation of video is that it’s harder to dive into complexity and sophistication. In writing, you can explain concepts, explore ramifications, analyze, assess, and synthesize all you want. Like in this blog post, for example. I’m doing all kinds of little mental explorations. In a scripted video, however, it’s much harder to do explore a topic in a structured, logical, interesting way. Perhaps videos force you to stick with the basics.

I haven’t tried doing more “thinking” in videos. As a test, I recorded the following short video last night:

As you can see, it’s somewhat rambling and meandering. But would you rather watch the video or read this post? I tried to essentially cover the same material.

Testing Content

My biggest takeaway from usability testing is that it opened up my eyes to the need for testing — not just testing design and functionality, but testing content as well. At Confab, I had breakfast with one of the presenters, Angela Colter, who was presenting on testing content. We test interfaces with all kinds of users, but if people are really interested in content, if that’s what they go to a site for, shouldn’t we be testing content instead? Shouldn’t content be the primary thing we test for, and then design?

I missed Angela’s presentation, but as I recall, she said something to the effect that when they tested content for a group of users, they found the content didn’t answer many of the users’ questions. I’d love to pull about 10 users into a room and have them review the content of a website or help system, based on various goals and questions they have. I don’t know why I haven’t done this before. Now I realize that not doing it for content has the same effect as not doing it for interfaces — you may think it’s fine, but if you’re the one who designed/wrote it, you become blind to its failures.

While the interaction designers’ pride pretty much crumbled while watching users try to use the interface, I imagine technical writers would feel the same way watching a usability test for their help. I have no doubt that users would experience as much or more frustration looking in the help file for various questions and answers. Perhaps this is why we tend to avoid usability testing for our help systems — the reality of how much help fails would be too much burden for us to bear. The results would force us to reassess and reapproach how we do help. Based on my experiences in watching users explore help, videos and on-screen help will now be my top priority.

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Building on Past Successes for Future Directions

Tom Johnson — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 06:56:39 +0000

The many directions one can go

I have a lot of flexibility and freedom in my job. That’s part of the appeal. The other day I was reflecting on the best route to take, the most fruitful path I should follow.

There are quite a few directions I could go. I could become meticulously detailed about style, knowing the ins and outs of every handbook (and being able to compare them with wit and perspective). I could become a tools guru in skinning online help, branding it with the right look and feel for our department. I could become a content producer, immersing myself in the product to write longer, more comprehensive topics.

Or I could become a SME project leader, organizing the writing efforts of a dozen or more subject matter experts (SMEs). I could become a manager, leading and inspiring my team. I could become a champion for usability, inserting myself into the design process and working towards better interfaces. I could become a content management specialist, managing the content for an entire team. I could become a community leader, or a single source champion, a taxonomist, a metadata specialist, a content strategist, a failing fiction writer, and many other things as well.

After reflecting on directions, I decided to focus on past successes. By successes, I mean those things from which I constantly hear praising feedback from customers. My main successes in tech comm have been with the following:

Quick reference guides
Screencasts

My longer documentation is fine, but no one ever writes in to say how much they enjoyed the user manual. In contrast, quick reference guides win users over every time, and screencasts actually show them how to use the product. People are always submitting feedback about how helpful the video tutorials were.

Outside of work, my two main successes have been as follows:

Blogging
Podcasting

Writing is my core strength, especially the blog format. And podcasts — well, I seem to go in spurts with them. I don’t think I’m a particularly good podcaster — I just happen to be one of the few people recording podcasts in tech comm. Regardless, I love the conversations and connections I make in my podcasts. That professional interaction is rewarding.

Of all the above, I think screencasts hold the most promising future. I plan to move more fully in this direction for several reasons:

I prefer to learn software by video (for example, by watching the videos at lynda.com). Text makes sense for a lot of things, but when people are learning software from ground zero (rather than searching for a specific question), visual learners prefer video more than text.
Videos are something others cannot usually do. Everyone seems to think they can write, but few can actually record a screencast. This ensures that I’m putting effort into a skill that can’t easily be replaced or outsourced.
Video has a lot of room for growth. I can learn so much about audio and video themselves. I want to learn After Effects so that I can better demonstrate concepts. This would be a powerful skill.

My screencasting prowess is only mediocre at best. Eventually I’d like to get good enough to create videos such as the WordPress release videos, or Mailchimp’s tutorials. I think there’s a high demand for people who can create this type of content.

That said, I’m also fascinated by findability, and there’s still so much here I haven’t explored. Even though it’s not my strength, perhaps I’ll add it as a key area of focus.

That’s me: quick reference guides, screencasts, blogging, podcasting, and findability. I guess that narrows it down enough. What’s your specialization?

——————-

photo from Flickr

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WordPress Tip: Embed a Video into a Post Using WordPress’s Auto-Embed Feature

Tom Johnson — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 13:39:22 +0000

Yesterday a couple of people asked me how to embed videos into WordPress posts. Rather than copying the entire embed code that youtube provides, you can actually just insert the link to the video into your post. WordPress will then pull the video in. This is a feature called auto-embed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2Av6lKAml4

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3. Avoiding a Sense of Rambling

Tom Johnson — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:26:25 +0000

A while ago I was gathering feedback on different tech comm deliverables. I asked a user if she preferred videos or written material when learning software. I thought she would immediately say “videos,” but it was a toss up for her. In her mind, videos involved long stretches of narration that included sitting passively at her computer, waiting for the narrator to get to her question but never really getting there.

A lot of people feel the same way about videos. In a recent post, Kristi Leach explains an attitude she once held about instructional videos:

I rarely appreciate video instructions, either–they take too long, because I’m pausing, following the step, playing, pausing again. I was having trouble imagining how videos were going to improve our help systems or fit into our schedules.

For Kristi, prior to her turnaround screencast moment, videos seemed to take too long and were difficult to follow along with in a step-by-step way.

When you write a script for a video (or when you create a general outline), you can avoid the problem of the eternal video — which I refer to as a sense of rambling — by simply keeping the video short. Don’t try to cover too much ground. You can generally speak about 100 words a minute, so keep that in mind with your script. 200 words is a good length.

If you don’t believe me, when you watch videos, look at the video’s time counter and note when you start losing your attention. My patience times out at about three minutes. So I always try to keep my videos at three minutes or less.

Video Length

Guidelines for video length are somewhat controversial. Part of the problem is that video content varies dramatically. If you’re watching an episode on Hulu.com, that’s different from a humorous clip on youtube, which is also different from an instructional video about a software application.

Video2zero conducted a study and found the “ideal run-time for web video 2.5 – 4 minutes.” Betsy Weber of TechSmith says, “For the blog, my goal is usually around a 3-5 minute video.”

Brooks Andrus says we should consider Twitter a model for brevity when creating videos. He explains:

… most [users] don’t have the tools or narrative capabilities to hold the attention of an audience for any real span of time. This is especially true in the screencasting realm which is why I’d like to propose the notion of TweetCasts–120 seconds or less of webcam or screen video. That’s all the time you get to make your point. If you need more time, break your content into chunks, give viewers a rest between segments and try engaging them through a different medium.

I agree with Brooks. As informal video producers, we don’t have the time to implement mesmerizing Hollywood cinematic techniques to keep our audience’s attention. It’s better to break long segments up into little chunks. It might be good to actually keep videos at 120 seconds, as Brooks recommends. Although sometimes you need up to three or four minutes to actually explain a feature, there’s no reason you can’t have several videos about the same feature.

Look at how Lynda.com approaches their videos. The following is a breakdown of videos about PowerPoint.

Lynda.com sample outline

This approach allows the user to skip to the part he or she wants to know. For example, in the above list of videos, I viewed only the videos with the eye icon next to them. Because the videos were chunked into small units, I could skip the video content I didn’t want to sit through. Small chunks give the user control and avoid the problem of never-ending rambling that I explained earlier.

Advantages to Short Videos

Aside from maintaining the user’s attention, keeping your videos short has several other advantages:

No worries about load time. A three-minute video rarely results in a file size of more than 10 MB. In contrast, with a 10 minute video, it could easily be 30 MB, which creates more problems when you deliver it. With large file sizes, you have to consider how to optimize the video. Do you reduce the visual and audio clarity? Do you force users to wait for it to load? Do you resort to streaming options? You don’t have to worry about file sizes and load time when your video is short.

You make fewer mistakes creating it. When you record a video, if you only have two minutes, you’re less likely to make mistakes than with longer videos. If the script is short, you can more quickly rehearse and practice the steps so you know what you’re going to say, what you’re going to click, and you can make sure all the glitches are out before recording. In contrast, with a 10 minute video, you set yourself up for numerous mistakes in both narration and demonstration.

Post-production is easier too. If you have a short video, it’s a lot easier to edit in post-production than a long video. With a long video, you may end up with multiple video segments on your timeline, with several audio tracks, each at specific points on the timeline. Editing an eight or ten minute video can be a nightmare in video choreography. Sliding over audio in one section can produce gaps in another section, and so on. It’s just a lot easier if the video is short.

No need for a TOC pane. If you have a long video, you usually need to add a table of contents so the user can see what you’re covering and when. But adding a TOC pane takes up precious screen real estate that usually you don’t have. If you record your videos at 1024 x 768, adding a 175px TOC pane on the left increases your video’s size to about 1200px, in addition to whatever space the browser frame takes up. You usually can’t assume your viewers will have that much screen real estate. If you shrink your videos, you often end up with fuzzy displays. In contrast, short videos don’t need a TOC because the purpose of the video is focused.

Active learning increases. If your video is short, you increase the sense of active learning that takes place. By active learning I mean you give users control to make decisions, to click to the video they want to see. This keeps the users more engaged. In contrast, if you force users to sit for extended periods of time in a passive state of mind, without allowing them to choose their own adventure, their minds turn numb. To keep their attention in a long video, you have to resort to all kinds of interactive strategies or cinematic techniques so they don’t fall asleep. Quizzes, branching, let-me-try situations, bending window panes that fly in and out, dynamic illustrations and diagrams — these are all good, but if you don’t have time to implement them, keeping your videos short decreases the need for these tactics.

It can be hard to keep the video short, because sometimes we feel we have to tackle an entire component in one go. But it’s not hard to break a video up into multiple subvideos about the same topic. And what viewer wouldn’t rather click on several two-minute videos than sit through a ten-minute video with an eternally rambling narrator?

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How to Embed Video on a Web Page

Tom Johnson — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 16:50:29 +0000

To embed video on a web page, you don’t need to upload your video to youtube, vimeo, or some other video sharing service. A lot of times in a corporate setting, uploading your videos to a third-party site isn’t appropriate or allowed. Does this mean you have to resign yourself to a basic WMV output that opens up in the Windows Media Player? No. You can grab the embed code from Camtasia Studio’s html output and copy it to a custom page to embed your video.

When you produce your video from Camtasia Studio (or from another video editing tool), make sure you select the Embed Video into HTML option.

To embed the video on a web page, select the embed in HTML option

In the output, you’ll see an HTML file. Open the HTML file up in a text editor such as Notepad++. You’ll see two sets of object embed code. Copy the first set, which begins with

and ends with

. It will look something like this:

Object embed code

I know there’s another section of embed code that actually says “Users looking for simple object / embed tags can copy and paste the needed tags below …” However, as of this post’s date, that code has a bug that prevents the first frame from appearing in Internet Explorer. I told Techsmith’s support about this bug, so hopefully they’ll fix it in an upcoming release.

Now that you have the embed code, do two more things. Upload your video output files to your server. They don’t need to be in the same folder as your web page at all. In fact, you can have them on another server entirely.

After you upload your video files to a server, change the paths in the code to reference the location of the files. For example, if the path to the files is http://idratherbewriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01, add this path before the video file names. You have to include the URL in three places.

Changing reference paths of the video content

Now that you’ve updated the paths to reference the location of the video, just insert the object embed code into the page where you want to display it. As an example, I’ll paste my sample code below. (By the way, the 15 second video below doesn’t have any sound or show anything in particular — it’s just a sample of an embedded video.)

Now your video is embedded directly on a web page, which makes it easy to view.

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Combining Cinema with Screencasting

Tom Johnson — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 05:55:02 +0000

Harry Miller is a multimedia enthusiast who brings his expertise with film and audio to the screencasting world at his job at Microsoft. The following three videos are some of the most creative, mesmerizing video tutorials on Visio I’ve ever seen.

Create an Office Layout

Create an organization chart using video

Create a Network Diagram

These video tutorials don’t just teach you how to create various charts in Visio. They make you want to be as cool as Harrison Clarity is with Visio.

More about Harry Miller

Update: Here’s a podcast where Harry Miller talks with his colleagues about their techniques and strategies in creating these videos.

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How Google Does Help

Tom Johnson — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 04:22:13 +0000

With all the talk about latest trends and avoiding extinction as communicators, and integrating web 2.0 and wikis, blogs, podcasts, and other interactive social media into help, it’s a good time to look at how Google — practically the leader of the web — does help.

Last week Google released Google Voice, a service that allows you to integrate all your phones into one number and includes a host of features, including voice mail, recording, conference calling, and other services.

To help users get started, Google Voice has a list of 20 short videos. Only the overview video contains animation. It’s certainly the video they’ve put the most work into, and it also functions as marketing collateral.

The other videos are fairly simple, with short looping background music, professional voice talent, and a read script. The defining quality is that each video is short, some as short as 25 seconds.

The videos aren’t integrated with the text help. So if you don’t feel like watching videos, you can’t easily read the same topic. Google Voice does have help text, but it’s on another page, only linked to from the videos with a tiny, hardly noticeable help link in the footer. It’s almost like one group produced text, another produced help, and they published them independently.

The video windows are small, under 500×500 pixels. The small video window allow you to easily move from one video to the next without losing your place in the site. If you click outside of the window, the window doesn’t automatically minimize, which is nice. You have to close the pop-up window to go back to the list of videos.

All the videos are pulled in from Youtube, so they’re shareable. After one video ends, you see a list of related videos, but the related videos aren’t other Google Voice videos. Instead they are other Google services. So the related videos somewhat fail if you’re trying to learn more about Google Voice.

You can’t comment on the videos, or upload your own, or do anything other than watch them. Unlike the Michael Pick videos on WordPress.tv, Google’s videos are somewhat boring. Except for the overview video, which contains an animated stick figure, they lack a sense of being cool. They feel a bit corporate.

Similar to the length of the videos, the help content is also short and to the point, but the help topics are too text-heavy, with almost no illustrations, diagrams, or screenshots. The pages are embedded on the web, and navigating the topics is somewhat tedious. A search field appears at the top of the help, but if you search for the word “videos,” nothing appears.

Glaringly absent is any printable manual. You can print a single page, but not a group of pages in a PDF manual format. Additionally, Google does not provide any kind of quick reference guide to get started.

You can’t comment below the help topics, but there is a forum. The forum allows you to be notified by email and see the most popular discussions. You can also read a Google Voice blog, but the blog, like the help and the videos, isn’t well integrated with the rest of the help materials. It somewhat lives on its own. Google’s blog also takes the backward position of disallowing comments and only allows linkbacks to the posts.

One interesting characteristic of Google Voice help is a lack of parallelism in the topics. Here’s a list of video topics:

Call screening – Announce and screen callers
Listen in – Listen before taking a call
Block calls – Keep unwanted callers at bay
SMS – Send, receive, and store SMS
Place calls – Call US numbers for free
Taking calls – Answer on any of your phones
Phone routing – Phones ring based on who calls
Forwarding phones – Add phones and decide which ring

The help topic titles are similarly unparallel. Usually help contains all verbs or nouns in a more parallel list.

My Analysis

Google puts a lot of effort in the overview video. That’s a smart move. When people want to learn about Google Voice, the overview video communicates the service in a catchy way, with more of Google’s branding. This video is probably watched thousands of times (a lot more than any other video), so it makes sense to go to the effort of including animation.

What I don’t like about Google’s help is the lack of integration between the video and help content. Not every topic deserves a video. Many times I’d rather read the help. And sometimes I’d rather watch a video. Separating the two formats so strongly is a poor usability move. The forum and blog also need to be more closely integrated with the other help materials.

Additionally, the lack of any printed manual makes me think Google has no single sourcing strategy. The help content is probably just written as regular text on each page. I would have appreciated the opportunity to print a quick reference guide or short manual, only because reading on the web is a nonlinear experience, and moving from one topic to another without any logical sequence can be tiring.

I also think Google chose the wrong voice for its videos. Google is playful, young, and irreverent. But the voice they chose is professional, corporate, scripted, and somewhat ordinary.

I’ve been thinking a lot about voice in videos. Professional voice talent is not necessarily engaging. It sounds professional, but a professional voice isn’t always what users want, even if it’s what they expect. Users want a voice that is friendly, engaging, conversational, and real. I wouldn’t even mind it to be a bit spontaneous.

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Use FTP? Here's the Jing Wrapper and Embed Code – Jing Blog

Tom Johnson — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 22:17:11 +0000

Use FTP? Here’s the Jing Wrapper and Embed Code – Jing Blog.

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AdobeTV

Tom Johnson — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 19:05:04 +0000

AdobeTV

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Podcast: Debunking the Boredom Myth of Technical Writing

Tom Johnson — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 13:42:59 +0000

Download MP3 (to download, right-click and select Save Target As)
Duration: 55 min.

Several weeks ago I wrote about my trip to Brigham Young University-Idaho and the presentation I gave there titled “Debunking the Boredom Myth of Technical Writing.” This podcast is a recording of my presentation.

My presentation was part of the professional writing conference that BYU-Idaho puts on annually for their writing and literature students. In the presentation, I talk about a prevalent myth that many students have — that technical writing is a boring career. To combat the myth, I explore the variety of content technical writers produce, including video, diagrams and illustrations, quick reference material, wikis, online help, information architecture, blogs, wikis, podcasts, and usability.

You can view my accompanying PowerPoint presentation here. Additionally, links to the three videos I played are below: