User blog:Taldin/Teaching By Talking -- Best Practices?

(Techie Thursday - wherein I share some stuff I'm learning, or working on, usually with technical nuts and bolts.)

I've got a project for work that I'm doing mostly for fun -- it's unlikely to get off the ground, and my teammates aren't helping very much.

We've recently had the mandate to add video instructions to our documentation offerings, and we (the technical writers) are the ones creating and shooting the videos from the ground up. The biggest complaint we have about the videos is that there's no sound. It's been suggested that we record voice instructions / commentary to the videos, instead of just piping some music in, making it a true instructional video.

The problem is that there's no consistent style for what to say, how to say it, whether to read off what you have as callout boxes and bullet points on the screen or just talk about them....

My mission statement is to come up with some best practice examples of what makes a good video with spoken instructions in it. And in using Tyler's video about Habitica as a 'good' example, I kinda realized I could actually just ask the rest of you; have you seen an instructional video that, well, really spoke to you?

What about videos where you didn't care for it -- 'bad' examples, so to speak?

Our own videos here are a little bit out of date; some of them are a lot out of date. I'm not sure if there's a plan to reshoot them at some point, but this could certainly be the start of something that helps Habitica at the same time.

(And heck, if nothing else, I can practice by recording videos...)

In other news:  I'm busy teaching myself a bit more about the new APIv3. One of the hardest parts is refreshing my memory based on stuff I haven't worked with for awhile, and discovering what's changed. One of the 'off in the weeds' moments I've had today is the fact that we've lost the Swagger UI, either temporarily or permanently; this means that if you want to adjust things using the APIv3 with HTTP calls, you have to construct them on your own. I've spent a good chunk of the day researching jQuery and curl and AJAX, and there are surprisingly few translatable examples. Simple examples, yes. Little things that pop up "Hello World' type things to your screen, yes.   A way to get to 'here's how you construct a request to the Habitica database' is definitely not clear to me.

I will get there, and when I do, watch for Techie Thursday for answers to questions you didn't know you needed to ask.