Tips for Making a Top-Notch Training Video

Know Your Video’s Purpose

You may be thinking, “But I already know the purpose. To teach people how to use the software. Duh!” But keep in mind that a tutorial can be designed to fulfill different needs. You should be considering the broader question of “Why is this video being created?” Is it to provide a basic introduction of the software to those who are trying it out? Is it an advanced tutorial for those who are already familiar with it? Is it a reference video designed to answer a frequently asked question, in order to expediently solve the user ’s issue and help take the load off of your support team? Knowing why this video (or series of videos) was commissioned in the first place is always a good start.

Learn the Basic Principles of Educational Multimedia

In the late 1990s, when computer-based training (CBT) started to gain some popularity as an alternative to traditional in-person software training, it was these same stand-up software trainers who were producing the first CBT modules. In their efforts to reach a broader audience, they created computerized training lessons, utilizing many of the same practices they had honed from years of experience in traditional training. Some of these techniques translated well to this new format; others did not. At that time, no major research in educational multimedia was available to the masses to help them adapt their training methods to a computer-based format. At least not until Richard E.

Mayer’s seminal Multimedia Learning appeared in 2001.

Throughout the ’90s, Mayer and his colleagues conducted an endless stream of educational experiments on how we learn with the aid of various media (technological and otherwise ). He found that people tend to learn much better from words and images than from words alone, thus lending empirical support to learning with multimedia.

From the results of these studies, Mayer assembled a series of educational principles, the adherence to which greatly enhances multimedia learning. I strongly encourage you to go read one or more of his books on your own, but for now, please allow me to provide a condensed list of Mayer’s principles. Hopefully, they will aid your training efforts as much as they’ve bolstered mine.

• People understand a multimedia explanation better when words are presented as verbal narration alone, rather than both verbally and as on-screen text (redundancy principle). This should already be familiar to those of you who have had to sit through a dull PowerPoint presentation where the host “presented” by reading all the bullet points off the screen. If we replace those bullet points with a chart, an animation, or a screen video, comprehension can be enhanced. Filling up the screen with narration text can waste a good opportunity for engaging the brain with visual media. There are a few exceptions to this principle, such as when introducing unfamiliar terms, or when the audience members are hearing impaired or non-native speakers of your language. In those cases, you’d want to reinforce narration with text. Fortunately, Camtasia Studio offers text callouts as well as captioning to address these situations.

• People learn better when information is presented in bite- sized chunks (segmentation principle). For our purposes as video content providers, this principle has a profound impact on how we split up our content. For tutorial videos, I typically find that three to five minutes for each “chapter” works best. As you work your way through the book, I’ll show you techniques for dividing your content automatically, and even creating a clickable table of contents, so that your users can seamlessly navigate your segments.

• People learn better when information is presented using clear outlines and headings (signaling principle). When utilizing Camtasia Studio, the signaling principle is instructive in a number of ways. First, it illustrates the importance of using title screens to announce your content. People seem to have an innate need to know what to expect. Title screens help to convey this information. The running time and duration displayed in the video’s controller bar aid in this as well, by informing the audience how long the video has been playing and, more importantly, how far they have to go. The users can then plan accordingly depending on how much free time they have in their day.

• People learn better when information is presented in a conversational style rather than a formal one (personalization principle). I think most people know this from experience on a conscious level, but I still see countless demonstration videos where the narrator is as stiff as a board. It’s usually the result of committee review where any shred of the creator’s personality is systematically removed for the sake of “ professionalism .” This is a mistake. When narrating your video segments, you need to stay warm and approachable, which includes both your terminology and your tone. And this doesn’t mean I’m necessarily advocating the use of gutter slang. It is possible to be both informal and professional at the same time. It can be a balancing act, of course, but the rewards are great if successfully executed.

• People learn better when on-screen text is presented near any corresponding images (spatial contiguity principle). This principle comes into play when placing callouts in your video. As an example, take a look at the two screens below:

  

  Which diagram do you find clearer?

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  So please don’t glue the users’ fingers to the monitor, forcing them to trace a maze of lines and arrows in an attempt to figure out what text goes to what graphic. It makes people confused , as well as making them smudge up their monitors with fingerprints …

• People learn better when any extraneous information is removed ( coherence principle). This is definitely something you want to be cognizant of while recording. Remember to keep the focus on the material you want to convey, and eliminate everything else. If your Windows desktop is going to be recorded at any point, then for goodness’ sake, change that funky desktop wallpaper to a solid color . Move any nonessential icons out of the recording area. Close any renegade windows . You want to make your recordings as clean as humanly possible. In addition to trimming out all the junk mentioned above, take care not to add irrelevant words, sounds, pictures, or music, as these can actually serve to hinder the audience from absorbing the material.

• People learn better from animation and narration than animation with explanatory on-screen text (modality principle). Of all the human senses, multimedia presentations typically engage two: sight and hearing. These are individual receptors, or pathways into the brain, and the reason that multimedia learning is successful has to do with the brain’s efficiency at receiving information from both these pathways at once. But there can be bottlenecks, as the modality principle demonstrates . By presenting animation, and then adding written narration (as opposed to audio) on top of that, you’re overloading one of the pathways , while the other one goes completely unused. When crafting your videos, it behooves you to balance the load.

• People learn better when animation and narration are synchronized than when they’re asynchronous (temporal contiguity principle). When the video and audio are synchronized, the learner tends to more strongly build connections between the words and the picture, thereby improving their ability to form an accurate mental representation of the content you’re trying to get across.

• The design of multimedia presentations can have different effects on people based on their prior knowledge, visual literacy , and spacial aptitude (individual differences principle).

This is a fancy way of saying that everybody’s different, particularly in terms of how they experience (and have experienced ) the world.

There is no “one size fits all” video experience that will appeal to everyone. But by following some of the principles above, your chances of truly getting the content across to your audience are actually quite good.

Recording Techniques for Training Videos

Here are a few handy tips for recording your training video once you’ve moved past preparation and into recording. While these techniques clearly do not fall under the category “prep-work,” their use specifically for training merits a spot in this chapter.

Make Liberal Use of Attention-Getters

Tutorial content should ideally guide the user through the use of the software with as little effort required on their part as possible. Particularly if the procedure you’re demonstrating has a lot of mouse movement and mouse click activity, using attention-getters such as mouse highlights, visual clicks, graphics and text callouts, and zoom and pan techniques can help to simplify what may otherwise be a long and confusing set of steps. Remember, what’s obvious to you as a content expert may not be quite so clear to those who are just getting their feet wet with your software, which brings me to my next point…

Slow It Down

The pacing of a video can vary wildly depending on its purpose. A marketing spot needs fairly fast pacing to keep the viewer’s attention while conveying the core benefits of the product in a 30-second to 2-minute long clip. Conversely, tutorial videos necessitate a much more relaxed pace. When running your audience through the procedural steps of executing a task on the computer, it’s remarkably easy to lose them if you go too fast. Additionally, if you’re likely to have non-native speakers of your language viewing your video content, you’ll want to be especially careful with the pacing, and remember to slow down the pace of your narration as well.

The nice thing about having tutorials in video format is the ability to provide a controller bar by which the users can navigate your video, even playing back segments they haven’t thoroughly understood . While this is certainly an added benefit, not every user will take advantage of it (in fact, a few might not even know how the navigation works). Good controls, while helpful, cannot take the place of good pacing.

Don’t Get Mired in the Details

Avoid the temptation to merrily skip from field to field in the program you’re recording, explaining every little thing along the way.

Provided you’ve done a thorough assessment of your target audience, you probably have a decent sense of their general level of technical savvy as well as their pre-existing knowledge (if any) of the application(s) featured in your video. You can use this information to help you decide how granular you want to be in explaining the different aspects of the software. Rarely will you need to explain every field in every tab of every dialog box, or how to perform basic functions within Windows. For example, even novice computer users know how to close windows, open files, and select icons. If you make a point of telling them, “you’ll need to double-click the program’s icon in order to open it,” then you’re wasting valuable time, and you risk boring most of your users into exiting the video.