Larry, I agree that video is a powerful medium for certain kinds of technical communication, but I have a couple of big problems with video.

First, video with sound is not cubicle friendly, and it is often impossible to tell if a video is going to have sound or not.

Second, technical communication obeys Sturgeons's Law -- 90% of it is crap. Specifically, 90% of it is useless pap that tells you everything you could work out yourself and nothing that you could not. For video, I think the ratio of pap is even higher, but that is probably because video in tech comm is still largely in the "Oooh, shiny!" stage of adoption.

The problems is, telling the crap from the gold takes much longer with video than it does with text. Comparisons of how long it takes to read a written procedure vs how long it takes to watch a video miss the point. The question is, how long does it take to assess ten written procedures to find the one that is not crap compared to how long it takes to assess ten videos to find the one that is not crap. It is much, much faster to find the one good text than the one good video. For this reason alone, I generally avoid video when I am searching for information -- the cost benefit analysis is all against it.

Social curation can help a lot here. If I do want a video on something, I have a much higher level of confidence looking for one on YouTube than I do looking on a vendor's site, because YouTube viewers have done the curation for me.

But for videos that are part of a docs suite, my preferences are these:

* silent (and clearly labeled as silent)
* short (better 6 10-second videos than one minute-long video)
* embedded in text (on the grounds that if the text is not crap, which I can assess quickly, there is a much higher chance that the video is not crap).

But if someone presents me with a six minute video, with sound, on their own site, with no social curation to raise my confidence that it is not crap, I'm almost certainly not going to watch it. I have better things to do with my time.

Thanks, Mark. Your thoughts contribute a lot to the discussion.

But I wonder: As you enumerate the shortcomings of video, are you actually describing the results of what happens when technical communicators know too little about the craft? If we had more skill, maybe we'd be making videos that are shorter, that are silent, that are labeled or metatagged in such a way as to make them easy to find and easy to evaluate.

You'd walk away from a video that doesn't suit your preferences. So would I. I'm guessing that, in lieu of the video, we'd both look for more traditional forms of documentation like manuals or online help systems. Someone in their 20s or 30s, however, might simply walk away, period. To avoid losing that person as a potential customer, I need to figure out how to do videos effectively. I just don't think there's any other option.

Larry,

I definitely agree that more training and experience will improve the quality of videos that technical writers produce, and I am more cautiously optimistic that they may learn to create videos in a more palatable format. (I am more cautions in this hope because there is still so much stubborn resistance among writers to creating text in a more palatable format for Internet use.)

I'm not sure that I agree with you about the next generation, however. For one thing, I remember being told -- more than once, by serious people -- that video was going to replace text, back when the VCR came out. It didn't. What did happen was that video came to play a somewhat greater role because the VCR made it somewhat easier to deliver. The web makes video even easier to deliver, and so I think it will play a greater role still -- up to, but not past, the point of its natural usefulness.

What I don't buy is the idea that the next generation are going to be mono-media morons who can only take information from videos. I recall that when mobile phones first came out, there was much hand-wringing at the prospect that teenagers would never learn to write at all. Then came texting, and now it is only old guys like us that still talk on the phone -- the cool kids just text each other. I fear the youth of tomorrow may forget how to speak!

Actually, I think the next generation will be multi-media mavens rather than mono-media morons. I think they will blend text, video, sound, and pictures far more naturally and effectively, and be far less hidebound about the conventions of a culture based on atoms, than we can ever hope to be.

Video will expand to fill it proper role in the information universe, but text, and its readers, are not going anywhere.

Hi Larry,

The typical technical communicator's lack of expertise in video production is a very real barrier to regularly including it in our strategy (and in our repertoire). This is one area that cries out for more collaboration with specialists in related fields--instructional designers and corporate videographers immediately come to mind. I think video (and to a lesser extent, audio) need to be part of an integrated technical communications strategy that supports whatever business model your employer follows.

However, in much the same way I have seen huge resistance to work working with marketing or customer support, I suspect it could be a long time before many technical communicators will embrace video, preferring "the way we've always done it." Perhaps what we need first is collaboration and mentoring from change managers....

Thanks, Connie. We certainly do need to tear down the walls that isolate technical communiation from other business functions like marketing and tech support. It's enlightening to think that technical communicators' embracing video is much the same process as technical communicators' recognizing that their department is part of a business and that it needs to be driven by the organization's business goals.

Will it be a long time before that happens? I hope not.

http://techwhirl.com/articles/trends-for-technical-communicators-to-watch-in-2012/

Love this discussion.

I work at HP and I'm putting together a presentation with Fer O'Neil of ESET for the May STC conference on using video in the tech comm space. http://www.softconference.com/stc/sessionDetail.asp?SID=276120#
Hopefully that's the session you referenced in your original post. Come join us then to discuss this in person.

I've been surprised by how little content there is about video at the STC conference and in STC publications. I spent the first 8 years of my work at HP doing online text documentation and the last 3 years or so focusing almost entirely on video / animation. You can find some of my videos at youtube.com/hpsupport, youtube.com/hpprintersupport, or hp.com/supportvideos.

I've had good luck experimenting with using video to enhance existing documentation. YouTube provides a great place to host videos that doesn't cost anything. Google does a great job finding videos in YouTube. You also get the ability to moderate comments and allow ratings on your videos. My favorite feature is the ability to upload transcripts to a video. Users in a cubicle farm can turn on captions and read the instructions along with the video. International users can change the language in the captioning and get a machine translated version (with warts of course). If I want, I can upload translated transcripts that even remove the warts for international users. Another helpful feature in YouTube is the ability to view the transcript and navigate the content of the video using the transcript. That's not a well known feature, but I can see that being very helpful as users catch on to that feature.
Here’s a good page that explains a bit about transcripts. http://support.google.com/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=100078

I don't think video solves world hunger, but it does give us another medium to meet the needs of our users. Some people prefer video – others don’t. Some topics work better with video than others. Some instructions are better shown than explained.

Here’s my take on a few of your questions.

*When is animation more effective? Live action?
In my experience, animation is more effective when I'm trying to show details of a task - usually involving small or difficult to light pieces of hardware. For software, you can do some screen capture and add animations to emphasize certain things. Live action works best when I want to show how a person actually interacts with a physical object. Animations sometimes make things look easier than actually are. Live action shows how a human performs the step.

*What's the ideal length for a video?
I don't believe there is such a thing. I see a lot of marketing fluff that says that videos should be between 30 and 60 seconds. The real answer is that it depends on your audience and the task. Don’t torture your users, but if you're providing information people need, they WILL watch much longer videos. YouTube provides some good metrics to help you understand where people drop off the videos. The challenge for me is creating videos meeting the needs of novice and advanced users, but that’s a familiar problem for most technical communicators.

*How do I integrate search terms and metadata?
Uploading a transcript to YouTube helps with this. YouTube helps by providing the keywords that people use to find your videos. That's a learning process as you adjust your title and description to match what people are looking for. Inbound links to your video are important in making search engines know that your content is relevant. Use other mediums such as Twitter or your corporate page to create those inbound links.

*What tools are best for what I need?
Keep it simple. I started with a $300 camera and $20 dollars in lights from a hardware store. Lots of screen capture options out there as well. If you provide the information people are looking for, they're willing to overlook imperfections. In my experience, customers are less impressed with the production level than they are with the relevance, accuracy, and simplicity of the information provided. Don’t assume that you need to go with a vendor who will create video for a huge chunk of change. If you expand later, a vendor can help you produce videos more efficiently, but you don’t need to start with a vendor.

One last thing to consider: take a few minutes to see what has already been created by users. You may be surprised to find that some of your users have already created videos for your audience. In some cases, the user created videos may have higher credibility than you can provide - even if the instructions are identical. Why reinvent the wheel?

Disclaimer: I am an HP employee.

Ben, this is great information -- extremely informative, and exactly the kind of response I hoped to get when I posted this article. Thank you!

Great answers Ben!

Larry, during my techcomm projects over the last three years I have consistently been asked to produce Screencasts by my clients and took upon myself to get trained in Camtasia and ScreenFlow. I feel that Screencasting is going to a necessary skill-set for any successful technical communicator in the future.

You might find the following useful:

Slides from my STC Screencasting presentation
http://www.slideshare.net/avisolo/using-screencasts-for-effective-user-assistance

My free online Screencasting course at P2PU (each task would be a lesson in class)
http://p2pu.org/en/groups/how-to-make-screencasts/

Good resources! Thanks, Avi.