"Common Elements of Effective Screencasts"

About the Author

Joseph Friedman was born and raised in Los Lunas, New Mexico. He graduated from New Mexico Tech in 2010. He now works doing freelance marketing for local Albuquerque rock bands.

Contents

Introduction

Literature Review

Documentation...

Screencasting Today

Elements of Effective...

Novel Ideas and...

Works Cited

Documentation and Multimedia

Documentation describes the use, handling, functionality, and other important information of a technical product. There are drawbacks with classical documentation (hard-copy user manuals). For example, traditional manuals do not engage the user as effectively as multimedia methods do. They are also more costly to produce and harder to update efficiently (Atkinson).

The idea of minimalist documentation presented by Carroll helped steer documentation design away from a large information-dump manual into a task-oriented manual that helped users do practical, real-world tasks. 

General minimalist principles:

Help users get started quickly
Allow for reading in any order
Coordinate the product with the documentation
Support error recognition and recovery
Encourage active involvement
Eliminate extraneous information (De Yoreo and Kauffman, 2004)

As public and private use of the internet increased, so did the idea of presenting documentation online instead of (or in addition to) physically. As documentation moved online, multimedia could be included to describe more easily what simple text and images could not. The results of empirical tests comparing traditional text and graphics and multimedia presentations were not surprising. Users were more pleased with the multimedia presentation, and the users performed tasks more effectively. (Rockley, 1998) 

It is also possible to achieve principles of minimalism in multimedia documentation (DeYoreo and Kauffman, 2004). One might notice similarities between minimalist ideas and cognitive load reducing principles. A screencast can also meet the principles of minimalism. A library of screencasts on specific topics, such as the Adobe Video Workshop, allows for users to get started quickly on the topic of their choice. Each screencast is self contained, so a user can use them in the order they choose. Each screencast also generally deals with a specific task, which appeals to the task-oriented focus of minimalist documentation. Screencasts are more effective than written words with static pictures (Eilers; Garb and Hunter, 2002).

Screencasts are multimedia, and the principles of effective multimedia therefore apply in a broad sense. However, these principles do not accommodate screencasts specifically. The next section explores the current literature specifically on screencasts.