Camtasia Studio 4: The Definitive Guide (Wordware Applications Library)

2017-07-07 02:10:07

While Camtasia Studio is used for all kinds of purposes, training really seems to be the one that speaks to people. In the work that I do for my clients, more often than not they engage me to create an online tutorial, knowledge base video, or some other form of training. This can run the gamut from some quickie “Getting Started” videos (to give new downloaders a leg up) to a polished, menu-driven CD-ROM, complete with comprehensive tutorials on every aspect of the software, which can then be sold (or given) to those customers who have already made their purchase.

Why Train with a Video?

Training videos can serve to augment traditional stand-up training or, in certain instances, replace it entirely. While nothing’s as good as being there, Camtasia Studio, with its inclusion of picture-in-picture camera video (so that you see the face of the trainer, hear the voice, and see the screen simultaneously), actually comes pretty darned close. Training videos also have the following advantages over traditional stand-up training:

Videos never tire of repetition. If users don’t understand something, they can always go back and view it again.

Videos are scalable. Deploy your video content to 10 people or 10,000, without a lot of extra time, effort, or money.

Videos travel better than people do. If you have 20 different people who require training in 20 different locations around the world, there’s no need to summon them to one spot in order to deliver training.

Videos are always available. Unlike trainers, who have a schedule to keep, videos are always at the ready, even at 3 a.m. If the trainees decide they’ve had enough for the day, they can come back to it the following day (or week) with no worries.

Videos are hassle-free. Stand-up training involves scheduling, reserving a classroom, and communicating with both the trainer and trainees to make sure everyone shows up at the appointed time. Not to mention the coffee and donuts. The logistics of video deployment are quite a bit simpler.

Videos can act as a “front line of defense.” People in the IT support department love training videos because they know that those users who never read documentation might just take the time to watch a video. In fact, many companies build whole video reference libraries of solutions to common problems. When they receive an e-mail from a frantic customer or colleague, they can simply send a link to the appropriate video along with the tag, “Contact me again if you have any additional questions.” Simple.

Videos can handle the training jobs no one else wants. I’ve heard of several companies who now use training videos as part of their standard new employee orientation, helping them to teach the more mundane aspects of the job, such as requisitioning office supplies or filling out a timecard. Not placing this training burden on your staff means not having to remove them from their normal duties every time you bring on someone new.

But chances are I’m preaching to the choir here - after all, you probably wouldn’t have purchased this book if you didn’t already know that Camtasia Studio video content excels as a training device. So, let’s move on to devising the best training program we possibly can. These tips are arranged in no particular order; they’re mainly here to get you thinking about your audience and the information you want to convey to them before you sit down to forge your masterpiece.

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?

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.

Set Specific Goals

It is my recommendation, regardless of video type, that you have certain predefined goals outlined before recording or even scripting begins. These goals need to be as specific as possible.

Bad example:

Take users through the new features of the software.

Good examples:

Show users how they can draw attention to certain words by utilizing the italic, bold, and underline commands.

Help users to move projects from their desktop to their laptop computers by first exporting a project on one machine, and then importing it on another.

Do you see how these good examples delve into more detail? Also notice that in both examples, I’ve given the reason why this feature is beneficial. Writers do occasionally need to place extra emphasis on certain words. And road warriors must often transfer their work between their computers. This is a critical component. By remaining cognizant of exactly how the covered feature is going to improve the lives of your audience, your tutorial can stay focused on the most expedient way of attaining that benefit. And that’s what we want: to get quickly yet comprehensively from Point A to Point B, giving users everything they need to know without adding a bunch of superfluous information. After all, this is a tutorial, not a knowledge dump. As tempting as it may be, you must do your best to avoid tacking on a series of “Oh, by the way…” remarks. While usually done with the good intention of being thorough, these additions typically only serve to confuse and detract from that feature’s main benefit.

Now, in the next section on marketing videos, we’re going to talk a lot about benefits. The first thing taught in any book or course on copywriting is to always focus on benefits rather than features. Allow me to put forth the theory that training videos are no different in this regard. In order to create a top-quality tutorial, you must not only show them how to perform a given task, but also start out by telling them why they would want to. You’re still focusing on the benefit, informing them as to how this feature is going to solve their problems. The difference with the tutorial video is that you then lay out the steps they’ll need to perform in order to bring that benefit to fruition.