Please stop with the video tutorials
- I can read faster than you can talk.
- I need information, not personality.
By the time you've finished introducing yourself, I'm already frustrated. The online video medium may be great for bloggers, but when I'm seeking information, everything else is a distraction.
The use of text to provide information has two main advantages (that I can think of right away):
1. It's silent - no extraneous noise to disturb others.
2. It's repeatable - no need to scrub back and forth to absorb something that may not have been clear the first time.
The first time I can remember being subjected to a video tutorial was for Rails documentation, which apparently decided to eschew text for some over-produced video introduction. I'm probably not the typical user, but that one omission has pretty much put me off of Rails since the beginning.
The most recent offender is Apple, with some demo video on setting up an iTunes account (w/o credit card) which guarantees I have to give up 4-10 minutes of my life that I will never get back, without any guarantee of getting the information I need.
While I point out two examples, there are many, many more out there where video/animation/flashiness is the primary or only method of documentation. A tutorial video should always be a secondary method of providing information, never the first.
Really, it looks great: nice titles, expensive animation, very creative. Now, what are you trying to hide?
Remember: I can read faster than you can talk.
43 comments
[ 6.5 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] threadBut even when I do have audio, I feel like I'm spending 6 minutes to get 30 seconds of information, which drives me nuts. The worst part is that if I need to reference something minor from the video later, I can't ctrl-f, I have to waste time seeking back and forth.
So yeah, people who make video tutorials I think should probably have their own special circle of hell.
3. I can search through text or skim it to see if it even contains what I'm looking for, and to skip the parts I already know.
I think the tech community does prefer docs over video but, the rest of the world loves watching videos.
1. Step-by-Step how to articles (including screenshots)
2. Overviews and guides
3. Tips & Tricks
I often see videos tutorial/documentation by themselves even if videos and text complement each other very well. Once the script for a videos is written, a good part of it could be reused for a text blurb.
- I can read faster than you can talk. Probably true but the question this leads me to is can you listen faster than you can read? If the video is HTML5 you can set the speed of the audio. At 2x speed I am becoming doubtful that you can read as fast as listening to the audio.
- I need information, not personality. Ignore the personality and take the information that you are in fact receiving still unless you're stating that the videos you have watched do not provide any information & only personality.
1. Headset, I didn't think people showed up to the workplace without these.
2. You are "scrubing" just with your eyes over the text; I am sure you reread something over & over until you fully understand it. This isn't that video tutorials are crappy but the UI of whatever is allowing you to watch the video sucks.
"guarantees I have to give up 4-10 minutes of my life that I will never get back, without any guarantee of getting the information I need." This also applies to the text version as well because there is never any guarantee that the information you are seeking is going to be there. If you want to argue out that the chances of the information being there in the text version is higher I'd agree but that isn't what you listed.
Perfect example of where a video tutorial trumps text... Udemy with Learn Python the hard way: http://www.udemy.com/learn-python-the-hard-way/ Way faster than reading the whole book especially when I was able to set the speed at 2x.
I don't believe this topic is even hacker news quality.
Personality is inescapable in a video presentation where either body or voice is present, unless the body and/or voice are computer generated. We are hard-wired to read body language or interpret inflection, even though we may be completely wrong.
If you're relying on the user having headphones, that's a mistaken assumption. There are any number of reasons that a person may not have headphones at the moment or ever. I have my own office, so I don't need headphones and I don't use them outside of my own home, in general, because I need to be aware of what's happening in the environment.
The UI for online video is pretty uniform across platforms. Yes, it sucks. To get a better UI with an actual, functioning scrub wheel, I would have to load it in Premiere or AfterEffects. However, the problem of chipmunk voice/missing phonemes applies just as much.
Well-written print documents will generally include a summary near the top that can be skimmed for informational cues in seconds. Furthermore, a standard page can be scanned for the same informational cues to localize the information. You cannot say the same about video.
I can't speak specifically to your Udemy class as I haven't taken it. However, printed course material can be re-read, taking in only the chunks that need to be re-read without having to remember a precise timecode and without having to spend much time in the preceding or following material.
I'm not a big fan of learning from video, but in the online classes I took this year, both on edX and on coursera, I found audio speedup perfectly functional.
Exception: when what's being taught is essntially visual. One example that's been relevant recently for me is a video showing how to solve a particular puzzle in Portal 2 (a video game). Describing the solution in prose would have been horrible.
PhotoShop tutorials can also work better as video than as text.
"Visual" does not imply "video".
- I scan through a bunch of pictures quicker than I can watch a video.
Remember that not everyone learns the same way. Some people are visual learners. So if you're saying that video is bad for teaching people a new concept or technology, then you're just wrong. It works extremely well for a massive amount of people.
While you can pour over tutorials on how to use Emacs; just watching a video of a power user using Emacs gives you a different impression. It is really a completely different experience.
Sometimes it is faster to produce a set of video tutorials than to prepare well-written documentation. Hence they make a call. However, I agree that written documentation is the best medium for long term (i.e. smaller, searchable etc)
So, rather than asking for one medium of instruction to stop, I would rather encourage the plurality. Let the end-user pick and choose whatever he/she likes.
Patio11 links a service that crowd-sources the translations, while the cost may be high for a beginning blogger it is peanuts for a startup or a high traffic site.
In one of my better elementary school science projects (not saying much, the rest were awful) I tried to compare auditory and visual learning in memorizing sets of numbers. The only result I remembered was that I learned better from reading the numbers on the page and that my siblings were different.
I personally don't like video tutorials. I rarely watch them. We don't have one on our site either. But many of our members have been asking us for one.
Our site also features video tutorials of other websites, and interestingly, I've heard many of our members cite these video tutorials as a major attraction of our site. They like that they can see essentially video demonstrations and tutorials of a website.
To each his own.
This is my biggest problem with video tutorials, and why I skipped so many lectures in college. I found a good compromise for me is to listen to video lectures at 2-3x speed. I'd prefer a textbook style format, but as arocks mentions it's often faster to produce video lectures, so I find there is a lot of great information out there on video but not in any kind of text/book format.
You may think this is a small market, but more and more people are becoming hearing-impaired, and at increasingly younger ages.
As a hearing-impaired person (since birth), if all you have are uncaptioned videos with little text (and often NO text), I'll just be moving right along, your website is useless (to me).
Update: Just to be clear: For tutoring videos, I spend my money based on what's captioned. There are plenty of online video training sites: codeschool.com, treehouse.com, lynda.com, etc. I pay for the ones that are captioned, and look longingly at the ones that are not, as some of them look quite good otherwise. Ditto for streaming video - Amazon doesn't support captioning, Netflix (finally!) does.
It lets you quickly and painlessly add tutorials to any page, without taking users off the page. Not the same as a video tutorial, but in many ways better.
If you hate video tutorials, try ours and let us know what you think!
I also recorded several short demos for the IDE I've been working on (http://studio.zerobrane.com/) as demonstrating live coding or live debugging seems to be much more effective when you can see it in action rather than read about it: http://studio.zerobrane.com/tutorials.html
You can provide more information and longer videos afterwards in a specialized section, when the user has been successfully engaged and is willing to invest time in learning about your services.
As mentioned in other comments, everyone has their personal taste. I feel I'm probably an outlier regarding kickstarter, but nevertheless it is a good reason to keep your write ups high quality.