I’ve been thinking about user-led learning lately. I have a set of tutorials that we refer to as “tours.” I imagine this term was chosen because the object is to give new users an overview of how to use the various parts of the application to accomplish the main task.

Some Background

Let me give you a bit of history on these tours. Before I was assigned to maintain the project’s documentation, these tours were built as PowerPoint presentations and run through a Breeze engine to create a Flash presentation. (I don’t know if Breeze in that form exists anymore.) Some pages had short videos created in RoboDemo. The presentations contained links to move forward and backward, so the intention was for the user to go from start to finish, similar to taking a tour in a museum: You begin in one place and move through a linear experience.

When I upgraded to the version of Breeze that came out after I took on these files, I found that somehow, multiple videos could play simultaneously. I could start a video on one page, then go to the next page and start that video. I would hear additional mouse clicks. If I went back to the previous page, that video would still be running.

Messy.

I manually moved the content into a new set of HTML pages because I knew that one page loads at a time, so it would be impossible for multiple videos to be running at once. I took the opportunity to learn CSS so I could lay out the pages that way.

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In an effort to improve a set of Captivate demonstrations I created for an application, I have started adding diagrams to the introductory slides where the voiceover exceeds 20 seconds. It’s a fairly arbitrary number, but I had to draw the line somewhere. After the introductory slides, I go into the demonstrations, so things move along at a pretty good pace. But I recognized that I’d put users to sleep if I didn’t throw some graphics or diagrams in to illustrate what I was talking about in those first slides.

Some concepts are easy to illustrate, but I’ve run into some trouble with slides where the concepts described aren’t so easily translated to images. While talking with a colleague to get some brainstorming going for one video, I decided that some of the script and voiceover needed to be rewritten so as to be more easily illustrated. So I revised it, and we were better able to connect certain images with the concepts.

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The rollout manager for one of the projects I’m with asked today for some way to provide trainers with a method of showing the application’s functionality in a controlled environment. It needs to be part of a presentation but not have room for surprises (those errors that appear at exactly the wrong moment, such as during demonstrations to the stakeholders).

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