Screencast Ideas

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Last month I had the opportunity to visit the Mozilla office in Mountain View. While I was there I had an interesting discussion with a few people from the SUMO team (short for support.mozilla.com) about some of the challenges with adding screencasts to their support articles. Since the volunteer community creates most of the content, it’s not always feasible for screencasts to have narration. Also, if they did, they’d somehow have to be localized into more than 70 languages.

But I’d love to see a way to make screencasts with narration work in a situation like this because they’re so much easier to follow. Here’s an example: Silent vs. Narration

So over lunch we kept kicking ideas around and David had a thought about breaking the video up and pairing it with text instructions that I think could make a system that will degrade gracefully (or looking at it from the other direction – offer progressive enhancements).

How it could work is that you see a short video with narration and text explaining the first part of the instructions. Then you click to move on to the following steps. Example: Video-Narration-Text

If there is no narration available for the video we’ve still made it easier to follow along (and to localize) by breaking it up into short pieces and by including text instructions right below or beside the video. Example: Video-Text

And if there isn’t video available at all, screenshots can be substituted. Example: Screenshots-Text