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| Written by James Ringrose | ||||||||||||||
Video FAQs - How they work and why? Imagine that you have a Frequently Asked Questions on your site, "How do I change a light bulb?" Even the best writer is going to be challenged, for a few moments, as to how to describe; removing the old bulb, holding the new one correctly, fitting the new one into the holder, etc. It takes a lot of effort to ensure that the words are not easily misinterpreted. Now imagine a 20 second video showing how to change a bulb! Easy to understand, concise and clear. Your mind can even fill-in any gaps in the video. Humans are really good at doing that visually.Scale that idea up to installing a complex component or perhaps describing a piece of software. A picture may be worth a thousand words but video is pictures, voice and graphics. All together, a much more engaging user experience. FAQs are notorious for two things. Firstly the user reads the wrong one, does the wrong thing and ends up annoyed with your company at best. Secondly, unless you or your team are brilliant writers, you only have to miss out a small obvious step and the user winds up looking for a new place to screw the new bulb, because you forgot to tell them to remove the old one. Video FAQs are easy to record. We typically take a couple of hours with an "expert" to shoot as many as 20 FAQs. They are quick to edit and can be available on-line in a couple of days. Sometimes we need diagrams or images, but normally we are talking about a simple show-and-tell. FAQs can be a combination of video, text, diagrams and photographs or just video as below. They have the additional advantage of a sanity check from our production team - if we don't understand then it's likely neither will your customers. It is also easy to create groups of FAQs by subject or product and have them in a similar player. Users and customers seem to really enjoy them. Of course you might be worried about cost. Well here's the good news. Video FAQs are relatively inexpensive and compare well to the preparation of written test. Definitely something worth considering, especially if your products are complex or need a lot of support. If you have ever read a description of how to change a cartridge on a printer then you know what I mean.
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