Continuing our discussion around the ROI for automating video production, a new client recently told us of two seemingly simple changes that became very compelling proof of why they chose to implement Videate now. In one case it was a last minute decision to make a product name change and in the other case the introduction of a list of “offensive words” that should no longer be used in any corporate materials.
The overwhelming majority of people we have surveyed in the software industry believe that there is a serious challenge with regards to producing product videos. The appetite for software videos is ever increasing across customer education, technical support, sales enablement, product marketing, and engineering. And yet when you ask the people who are responsible for producing product videos what processes and standards they have in place, the answer is typically focused around best practices on how to record, not how to write quality scripts that are sustainable for the future.
Many of you who work in technical documentation are familiar with tools and technologies that generate multiple outputs using single-source content strategies. Solutions for content reuse and multi-channel publishing have been around for more than two decades. And while the most common formats, PDF and HTML, are still very valuable for knowledge base, support tools, and product documentation, if you work for a software company, video has become a must-have requirement for training, sales, and customer enablement.
In the past few months some things have become very clear. Customers are not going back to classroom training any time soon. Some of you will say, “what about Virtual Instructor Led classes?” They will linger around for a while longer, but the issue is not the delivery system for instructor-led training. If you are a software company it’s now about “Education as a Service” vs. one-time training events.
Do you have a separate budget for producing software videos? If you are like most companies the answer is no. While a few very large companies have in-house video production capabilities and some other organizations use third-party resources, the most typical scenarios for creating software videos are these:
One of the great challenges of modern SaaS applications is keeping the onboarding tools, technical documentation and videos up to date. Agile engineering and releases means things change rapidly and while some of the very largest companies can limit the number of annual releases to two, most teams are faced with quarterly, monthly or more frequent releases. There are some great onboarding and tech pubs tools available in the market, but very little in the way of solutions for video automation and translation. If you have frequent releases keeping software videos up to date in multiple languages has been at best a nightmare and at worst impossible. Until now.
A lot of articles have been written about the fact that the majority of people at SaaS companies are now working from home as a result of the global pandemic, either for an extended period of time or permanently. We don’t want to sound like we are taking advantage of this terrible situation, but the reality is that as a result of everyone working from home, many processes need to change and that includes how your organization produces software videos.
Does this sound familiar? Your team’s “Definition of Done” means that every software release contains updates to the relevant documentation. Tech pubs is busy writing, capturing the new screenshots and watching for the final changes. And then the new version of your software is released. Time to celebrate!
In 1950 Alan Turing developed the “Turing Test” to determine a machine’s ability to demonstrate intelligence equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. An interrogator is allowed 5 minutes to interact with a black box which is either a machine, or a hidden human as a control, to determine if the entity is a machine or human.
Sometimes it’s quite amazing to learn that small things can make a huge difference when you build a new product. When Videate was founded, the problem we set out to solve was immensely difficult, that being how to automate the production of videos on every software release. As more clients started to use the platform, they asked if Videate could solve another very painful and time-consuming activity. What about screenshots?