Using video to document – thoughts?
Scott Klement had a good article in his newsletter today: http://systeminetwork.com/article/why-not-video-documentation
I am curious to know if the RPG community thinks video tutorials are a good thing? I personally think video tutorials are an excellent way to convey some scenarios that would have otherwise taken many cumbersome textual paragraphs to describe. I have also found that I make judgement calls on how modern a particular company or tool is based on whether or not they have video tutorials showing how to use different aspects of their offering (which reminds me, I should take inventory of what I have done for videos concerning RPG-XML Suite lately :-) I first realized how excellent technical video tutorials were when I was first learning Ruby On Rails (aka RoR). They had some excellent and simple tutorials that had me up and running in about 10 minutes – very cool.
So, what do others think about videos for documentation?
aaronbartell.com
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When everything was text based (either 24 x 80 or the printed page) it was a simple matter to document choices and actions with words. Now, with graphics the norm, it’s far more difficult to do so. I like Jing for short bits of video.
I think it is a very good idea.
Hi,
replacing a text based user interface with a graphical one should make the use of the software less difficult and if, as a result, its far more difficult to document choices and actions, maybe I have failed my initial goal to reduce complexity (just a thought).
Videos might help to sell the software (and this is an issue even for individual software for one company), maybe a Video tutorial could assist in learning to use some piece of software, but the most important part of user documentation is a good online help system. To keep this up to date it must be embedded in the software itself, to get a workflow, that changing something in the implementation of the software causes a direct change request to adjust the online help of the user documentation.
Having a look at Microsoft Office, or Eclipse, wich are rather complex and I am using both, I even don’t know about Video documenatation, I’ve never missed it (maybe its my age and I’m too old…), there is none of printed or printable documentation, but there is an online help system and there are newsgroups to assist each other and I’m quite comfortable with this). In the world of Java we have Javadocs and things like alphaworks to assist in implementation of documentation, but in the world of RPG??? And bringing this to RPG is only one thing, or who of us uses ILEDOCS (Author Mihael Schmidt, hosted at RPGNEXTGEN.COM) or log4rpg (Author Thomas Raddatz, hosted at TOOLS400.de)???
Dieter Bender
Hi Dieter,
I think you call out an important point in that there are right and wrong places to use video documentation. I would always lean more towards using video documentation to define a set of steps that the user needs to accomplish on the computer. Here is an example of that where I show how to create a web service from scratch using a variety of steps and tools: http://rpg-xml.com/video/rpg_web_service_from_scatch/rpg_web_service_from_scatch.html
Typing that all out in textual form would be cumbersome and might not make sense to everybody, but having it in video form causes it to make sense to everybody (minus additional question they might have, but they understand what action I took).
aaronbartell.com
Yes i do believe Video tutorials are useful, but they should be light capacity, where any connection types (Dialup, DLS, cable or what ever) can watch them.