
Please stop with the video tutorials - drivingmenuts
Seriously - to all you budding video stars out there with the video tutorials on how to use your product:<p>- I can read faster than you can talk.<p>- I need information, not personality.<p>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.<p>The use of text to provide information has two main advantages (that I can think of right away):<p>1. It's silent - no extraneous noise to disturb others.<p>2. It's repeatable - no need to scrub back and forth to absorb something that may not have been clear the first time.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Really, it looks great: nice titles, expensive animation, very creative. Now, what are you trying to hide?<p>Remember: I can read faster than you can talk.
======
arocks
If you have been into teaching you would realize that there are different
kinds of learners. Some prefer verbal material, others prefer more visual,
while some others like written material. The vast majority however prefer a
combination of the above.

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.

~~~
caw
patio11's podcasts are great. He provides both the audio file and also the
text transcript. If you read the transcript, he adds notes and context with in
brackets.

~~~
masterzora
We need more of this. Podcasts and videos don't work well for me at all and
there are far too few transcripts around. The notes and context is going above
and beyond right now but it really should be the norm as well.

------
armored_mammal
I hate video tutorials. I don't even have audio at work so if there's a video,
I'm gone.

But 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.

------
amarcus
It really depends on the target audience. I, for example, love to read
documentation rather than watch videos. However, the users of my webapp (not
technical at all) prefer video tutorials. We provide a large number of
knowledgebase articles as well as video tutorials. Our video tutorials have 4x
the click-through than our knowledgebase.

I think the tech community does prefer docs over video but, the rest of the
world loves watching videos.

~~~
vannevar
Not to knock your videos, but unless your knowledge base specifically includes
written tutorials, that would be an apples-to-oranges comparison. If I'm a
beginner, my hierarchy of preference would be written tutorial (illustrated) >
video tutorial > technical manual.

~~~
amarcus
Our knowledgebase is split into 3 different sections:

1\. Step-by-Step how to articles (including screenshots)

2\. Overviews and guides

3\. Tips & Tricks

------
ckdarby
Why is this thread comment so unfocused? Firstly this has started with stating
a broad statement of video tutorials suck which would appear to be for link
bait reasons, but this broad statement is followed by a specific statement
that shows he's talking about product tour videos and then it is recapped near
the end with stating that video tutorials for programming suck. Lets me
straight here...product tours are not video tutorials for starters and
anything that focuses on a product aside from training of how to use a product
are product tours and I personally believe they are tutorials at all.

\- 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.

~~~
drivingmenuts
Audio speedup either generates chipmunk voice or cuts phonemes. Neither is an
acceptable substitute, especially if one has hearing or cognitive issues. Even
at 2X audio speed, I can still be halfway down a page while you're finishing
the first paragraph thanks to an ability to skim information for keywords.

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.

~~~
microtherion
_Audio speedup either generates chipmunk voice or cuts phonemes._

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.

------
petercooper
"E-mail newsletters are so 90s, nobody reads them." .. "You can't charge $500
for an online course." .. "Video sucks, is a waste of time, write stuff
instead."

Those of us in the business hear such false maxims all the time and just get
on with doing what works, whether it's video, charging tons of money, sending
people morse code, making people sign up for e-mail, or whatever. Do what
works, not what people _say_ they think works.

Amy Hoy did a great talk about this with lots of similar examples:
<https://vimeo.com/39750688>

------
burntwater
Video, whether it's tutorials or product demos, are useless to the deaf,
heard-of-hearing, and blind. Transcripts or captioning go a long way, but they
are very rare.

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.

------
paulclinger
I'm on the fence about this. I was teaching an introductory computer science
class last summer and used case studies as one of the main elements of the
class (this is when we discuss how to solve a problem and I would code the
solution in front of the class; usually 10-15 minutes or so). It worked very
well for the class, but several people indicated in the exit survey that they
would prefer a recorded version (even though they would lose the
interactivity) as they could refer back to the things they missed or didn't
quite understand.

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>

~~~
jfaucett
I'm with you on the fence here, I just think it depends on context.
drivingmenuts seems to be talking (at least from the examples) about "how to
guides/documentation" that is your usual stackoverflow, google run'of the mill
"how do I solve this problem". For all those cases I think he's right on the
money. when reading you can skim and find a solution to a specific problem way
faster than watching any video. Also for me, all I ever want from these kinds
of posts is almost always some the souce code, which means I barely read
anything else anyway. But when it comes to acquiring new knowledge (ie.
learning as apposed to just "refreshing" or filling in some obscure hole), I
think it can be helpful to watch a video because you get commentary and the
whole thought process behind whatever concepts are being presented.

~~~
paulclinger
I agree. I think for those who are learning, seeing the thought process behind
something is very important (as long as they are paying attention). I have
also seen research that shows that "speaking aloud" improves your own learning
and retention, so seeing someone else to do it is helpful too. Even having a
transcript is deficient to some degree as you don't see a correlation with
actions and because you lose timing aspect.

------
anonymouz
I would add:

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.

------
mrgreenfur
I'll take this time to plug my startup: <http://tutorialize.me>

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!

~~~
loodno
Why should I use your service rather than take 10 minutes to implement my own
popups?

~~~
mrgreenfur
Because you can spend the 10 minutes building something more interesting. In
all likelyhood it's more than 10 minutes over the lifetime of the tips. For
example, if someone wants to change or add one. Or if they work and you want
to add another. Why not let someone else make them and spend engineering time
on your actual product?

------
endemic
Yeah, video tutorials are the worst. I can either view the video full screen
in an attempt to read the code which is being presented (while losing the
ability to type along in my editor), or squint and type. Even in a primarily
visual program (such as Unity3D) I prefer text-based tutorials.

------
dventimi
By my lights, the most effective application of "video tutorials" is not as
tutorials at all, but rather as marketing tools, and that's not necessarily a
bad thing. In the best cases, watching a mercifully-brief video "tutorial"
gives me a sense of what it actually looks like and feels like to use some
tool/framework/language/whatever. That helps me decide whether it's something
I want to dig into deeper (say, by using ACTUAL tutorials, reading docs,
etc.), or whether it's something I can safely ignore.

------
russelluresti
I... what... you need to give me back the time I wasted reading this post. You
talk about product demos, learning tutorials, and demos. These are not all the
same thing, and have different use cases.

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.

~~~
Zecc
Visual learners, like myself, can look at pictures. It's still more convenient
than watching a video IMO.

------
lumberjack
Everything in moderation. Long intro videos are annoying and off-putting but
so is a very big chunk of text. Why not a little of both? A short paragraph,
or better yet a list of that your services are, and a short <45s about your
services.

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.

------
rm999
>I can read faster than you can talk.

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.

------
reefab
I concur and I do understand why they do make those kind of videos for the
portion of the population that prefers watching videos to reading but I don't
get why it so seems to be such a dichotomy.

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.

------
owenfi
This applies to kickstarter projects (for me) as well. The majority of
projects I've backed (32) I do so before ever watching the promo video (if I
do at all).

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.

------
MikeTaylor
In general: totally agree.

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.

~~~
masterzora
Exceptions should not be of the form of "replace text with video" but rather
"supplement text with video". If nothing else, consider the accessibility
aspect of it, let alone those of us who will do better with the text source
almost every time.

------
devs1010
I agree, I hate those slide presentations too. If its about programming, I
want to read it, period. I don't want to watch a video or go through a
slideshow

------
countessa
yes. advantage 3... text is still easier for search engines....so it's nicely
indexable and as a result, more likely to land up in your search results.

------
bjpcjp
+1. I almost never make it through a video tutorial. The only exceptions are
Railscasts, and my batting average there is only .500.

------
bryanlarsen
I hate video tutorials, but people seem to love those things. How about the
best of both worlds a la RailsCast / AsciiCast?

------
Morendil
Possible counterexample: <http://xiki.org/screencasts/>

------
antihero
Good for you, but please understand that there are others who learn much
better with a video tutorial.

------
expralitemonk
Video information cannot (yet) be indexed so you cannot look up the
information on Google.

------
gadders
Agreed. Don't give me video tours of your product, either. Give me screenshots
with text.

------
dsolomon
Go away troll.

