And now, ...the video

First, I want to thank everyone who responded to my prior blog post and its accompanying survey, where I asked when video is better than a paper. As I mentioned already in the comment section for that blog post, the results were loud and clear: 53.9% of respondents indicated that they’d prefer reading a paper, and 46.1% indicated that they’d prefer watching a video. Basically a clean 50/50 split.

The comments suggested that people have a lower threshold for “polish” with a video than with a paper, so one of the ideas to which I’ve needed to modify my thinking is to just create decent videos and publish them without expending a lot of effort in editing.

But how?

Well, the idea came to me in the process of agreeing to perform a 1-hour session for my good friends and customers at The Pythian Group. Their education department asked me if I’d mind if they recorded my session, and I told them I would love if they would. They encouraged me to open it up the the public, which of course I thought (cue light bulb over head) was the best idea ever. So, really, it’s not a video as much as it’s a recorded performance.

I haven’t edited the session at all, so it’ll have rough spots and goofs and imperfect audio... But I’ve been eager ever since the day of the event (2013-02-15) to post it for you.

So here you go. For the “other 50%” who prefer watching a video, I present to you: “The Method R Profiling Ecosystem.” If you would like to follow along in the accompanying paper, you can get it here: “A First Look at Using Method R Workbench Software.”

When is Video Better?

Ok, I’m stuck, and I need your help.

At my company, we sell software tools that help Oracle application developers and database administrators see exactly where their code spends their users’ time. I want to publish better information at our web page that will allow people who are interested to learn more about our software, and that will allow people who don’t even realize we exist to discover what we have. My theory is that the more people who understand exactly what we have, the more customers we’ll get, and we have some evidence that bears that out.

I’ve gotten so much help from YouTube in various of my endeavors that I’ve formed the grand idea in my head:

We need more videos showing our products.

The first one I made is the 1:13 video on YouTube called “Method R Tools v3.0: Getting Started.” I’m interested to see how effective it is. I think this content is perfect for the video format because the whole point is to show you how easy it is to get going. Saying it’s easy just isn’t near as fun or convincing as showing it’s easy.

The next thing I need to share with people is a great demonstration that Jeff Holt has helped me pull together, which shows off all the tools in our suite, how they interact and solve an interesting and important common problem. But this one can’t be a 1-minute video; it’s a story that will take a lot longer to tell than that. It’s probably a 10- to 15-minute story, if I had to guess.

Here’s where I’m stuck. Should I make a video? Or write up a blog post for it? The reason this is a difficult question is that making a video costs me about 4 hours per minute of output I can create. That will get better over time, as I practice and accumulate experience. But right now, videos cost me a lot of time. On the other hand, I can whip together a blog post with plenty of detail in a fraction of the time.

Where I need your help is to figure out how much benefit there is, really, to creating a video instead of just a write-up. Some things I have to consider:

• Would a 15-minute video capture the attention of people who Do people glaze over (TL;DR) on longish printed case studies on which they’d gladly watch about 15 minutes of video?
• Or do people just pass on the prospect of watching a 15-minute case study about a problem they might not even realize they have yet? I ask this, because I find myself not clicking on any video that I know will take longer than a minute or two, unless I believe it’s going to help me solve a difficult problem that I know I have right now.

So, if you don’t mind giving me a hand, I’ve created a survey at SurveyMonkey that asks just three simple questions that will help me determine which direction to go next. I’m eager to see what you say.

Thank you for your time.

The Thing (I Don’t Like) About Video

Video is awesome. I like high-bandwidth communication. Even on the cheapest, most un-produced videos, I can see facial expressions and body language that I’d never be able to pick up from text. I can see candidness that’s not going to come through in a document, even a blog that’s written pretty much off the cuff. And videos with high production value, ...well of course it’s awesome to watch a great short movie right at the tips of your fingers.

But...

But when you send me a 7:48 video, I have to budget 7:48 to watch it. (Well, more actually, because of the latency required to buffer it up.) When you send me a 13-page document, I can “read” it in 10 seconds if I want to. I can skim the first and final paragraphs really quickly and look for pictures or sidebars or quotes, and it takes practically no time for me to do it.

With a video, it’s just more difficult to do that. I can watch the first 10 seconds and usually know whether I want to watch the remainder. But skimming through the whole video—like skipping to the end—is more difficult, because I have to sit there un-utilized while the whole video buffers up. Then I have to sit there while words come at me aurally, which is annoyingly sequential compared to reading buckets of text in one eyeful.

So, the bottom line is that the first 10 seconds of your video need to convince me to watch the remainder.

Or I won’t.

Is it just me?

What’s out there to make video browsing a better, more time-efficient, and more fulfilling experience?