Download Slides

Download Informational Sheet

DITA & XML Community of the Rockies

For me, video integration is the next logical step in the evolution of DITA ;->. It’s not just that video is cool (well, video is cool, but coolness is hard to measure in ROI metrics terms). Relevant visual media coupled with text-based content has been shown to improve learning up to 87% (Dr. Ruth Clark and Dr. Richard Mayer, UC Santa Barbara). Of the visual media, video is high on the food chain. Research at University of Pittsburgh compared the effects of video with printed text, still pictures with text, and text alone. Video-with-text presentations produced results that were significantly superior to still-picture-with-text presentations (Dr. Khalid Al-Seghayer).

Video is not just a passing trend or window dressing. Done well, it makes the user experience better, and better search mechanisms through segmentation is a way of respecting our users’ time – our time – as we are all information consumers. The side effect of being better educators, is that we enhance our company’s bottom line. Is this connection tenuous? Show me a company with crappy help and I’ll show you a company that is hemorrhaging money by overtaxing its support team, handicapping its marketing effort, alienating users unwilling to wade through a swap of data, and may not fully understand the information re/evolution we live in. Information democratization means choices: if we don’t like the candidate, we move on.

The perception that video is costly to produce is a very real obstacle. It really depends on the scope of the project. There are three points that I’d like to make with regard to cost:

1. Reuse: Segments are IDed. With segment IDs, we enter into an object-oriented framework, where we can surgically update specific video segments. This reduces production costs over time, especially in an CMS construct.

2. What if you could put together a video mashup using open tools and standards “for free”. If Scott is amenable to such a series, I’ll be putting together a set of tutorials that will help tech pubs shops assemble the major building blocks of such a system. Stay tuned.

3. What is the cost of not taking a serious look at video as one more tool in your company’s toolbox? While I am dubious of some of the user-generated video found on the Web at large with regard to its educational value, YouTube does give us a glimpse through the glass darkly of the potential/inevitable magnitude of video’s role in online documentation and training.

Last week’s DocTrain West Conference was the “debut” of the video-integrated documentation demo. The positive feedback at the conference and into this week has far surpassed my expectations. Yesterday, a friend asked me how the concept of video/DITA mashups was received at the DocTrain. I told him that I feel a bit like Quint when he sees the shark for the first time and says, “I think we need a bigger boat.”

Mark,

My mistake…. I must have passed Scott a dead link. Try these:

Camera-generated video

http://screencast.com/t/z0OyhgXn6cV

Software-generated video

http://screencast.com/t/gQpxl6Fiz

In my view, it will be interesting to see what happens as text-based documentation is replaced (and in many instances it should be) or accompanied by video documentation (in situations where this additional content provides value). As always, just because a project like this takes effort, storage space, or new software, skills, etc. is no reason it shouldn’t be pursued. I believe video documentation is the emerging field of technical communication with huge growth potential. Only time will tell if I’m correct.

What’s really exciting is that people are doing it today. In fact, here’s a link to a set of task-based online help files that has been beefed up with video (and encoded in DITA!) http://screencast.com/t/AZn6ijjbP (no sound yet, just video).

A few case studies will be available soon. And, there are some vendors working on top secret video and DITA projects right now. I can’t wait to see what they come up with.

Scott Abel

The Content Wrangler

If you’re not yet a member of The Content Wrangler Community, join us today! http://thecontentwrangler.ning.com

For one, the cost is steep, at about one day per minute of high-quality finished video. Especially a short video is to convey information accurately, it’s important to pay careful attention to the things in the background or foreground—such as the default items in a list, or the values in the sample data. Since time between video projects is usually months, we are at best perpetual intermediates, re-learning the same feature set over and over, and never reaching the efficiency of a frequent user.

For two, video takes up a lot of space. I love using TechSmith Camtasia’s zoom-and-pan feature, and I love the control I get over the interaction and captions that a demo movie models in Adobe Captivate (though I should say the default captions are rarely right), but I wish it were easy to get both in one place. The important action can almost always be conveyed in a small window, but since interfaces are often larger, it takes a larger stage to show it all. (This is why Camtasia’s zoom-and-pan feature is such a delight.) TechSmith Jing is great, but allows no editing at all. The most frustrating thing is that neither Camtasia nor Captivate are intended for documentation content creators—thought that’s how Captivate started out, when it was still named RoboDemo.