Transcription

SAM: Ross Wintle who is a freelance developer and consultant from Swindon.  Scared of elephants.

He will be talking about the benefits of training users with screencasts.  How you can get started doing it yourself, so a round of applause for Ross.  (APPLAUSE).

ROSS WINTLE: Thank you Sam.  People came, always amazes me that people come so welcome.  I hope you are enjoying WordCamp we are nearly at the end.

My name is Ross Wintle.  I am a software developer and one of the odd things about me being a software developer and giving talks is that I tend not the give talks about technical topics.  So, hopefully you will enjoy this one and my perspective on it.

There aren’t many people in the world called me, if you want to find out more about me, there is a screencast of how to find out more.  The only other thing you need to know is that I am not an Australian cricketer.

There we go.

There is a lot of animated gif’s in my slides they do advance slowly sometimes.  Hopefully they will keep up.

So, quick user research audience research, who has ever and I hope you know about these things already, if not this is going to be embarrassing, who has shown someone what the screen options are and what they do?  If you don’t know, here is a screencast of the screen options in use.

Who has shown someone where the kitchen sink or where the toolbar is?  Again a good few hand ifs you don’t know about the toolbar or the kitchen sink it gives you additional formatting options in the editor and much easier to show that way.

Who has shown someone how to add an excerpt.

Who has written a user guide for WordPress?

Who has ever done, oh, that thing, who has ever done friends and family IT support on the hands! So I am here to explain what if, there was a better way of doing some of these things.  What if there was a faster way?  What if there was an easier way?

Video, is easier than ever before, there is a little device there in the middle of the room that is live streaming me and my slides and some of this room to a screen outside.  Our mobile devices have video built in, we can stream stuff on Facebook with the click of a button, we can up load stuff to you tube, down load video in copious quantities from all over the globe.

Tools for recording video and sharing with the world are so freely available, easy to use now and screencasts for me, have become a regular part of my tool kit as a developer who works with clients and they have been a great way for me to both teach people and learn some things myself and the idea of this talk to try and share with you the experience that I have gained from 2 years of using this part of my tool kit.

So let’s start by talking about why you might want to use them?

Oh no, this is the title.  The full title.  I always come up with the enormous long titles:  Why and how to use screencasts and cover video and animations, and animates gif’s, to train user for customer support, software development and if you are willing to put in effort for the good of everybody.

The format is we will talk about why screencasts are good and tools and tips and tricks I will try to disseminate to you, grab me after if you want to see these things in action.

Does anyone not know what a screencast is?  Anyone recorded or shared a screencast or recording with anyone?  Okay most of you.

I will split this into 2 parts I will explain what I think is a screencast is, let’s talk about screens, it is a screen recording of some sort.  It can be narrated it maybe silent, it may have an additional video like in an inset video of the person recording the screencast, looks something a bit like this, which is me creating my slides.

The cast part of the word screen past can be scary you might think that means you are having to broadcast the thing you are creating to the world and this is not necessarily true, you can send your screencast to a single person or a single organisation.  It doesn’t have to be something that you share publicly with people.  Don’t think I am talking about live streaming you doing your work or live streaming a training session to the world.

So why are they so good?  Why am I up here raving about the thicks.  Let’s talk about one-to-one training.  When I quit my corporate job and became freelance I spent a lot of time in coffee shops and offices with people, showing them how they can use like just teaching them the basics of WordPress.

That was great, it got me time with my client and there were lots of good things about it.  It was personal, I could, the client could ask questions of me and it could all be tailored to their needs but was time consuming, travel was usually required and because of those two things it was expensive and critically, it is also a one off thing.  You have had that conversation with that one person and if that person moves on and is replaced within their organisation, then passing that training on isn’t an easy thing to do.

Don’t take these as like statements of fact.  These are like extreme opinions intended to demonstrate my points.  So, I have come up with a single word the try and describe each of these types of training and one-to-one training is expensive.

But that is not to say it is a bad thing, still do it if you do it.  It a useful tool to add to your tool kit,.

The next step up is classroom training, classroom training is also great.  It enables you to talk to more than one person at once, but classroom training is even more time consuming to prepare and you need certain skills to deliver it.  People can still ask questions while they are there and people can actually run businesses doing this.  So people have businesses running classroom training for WordPress, so it can be a sort of money for you.

But you need to kind of be good at training to do it.  Travel again is required.  So it is expensive and again once you trained those people they can’t necessarily give that same training experience to a replacement if they come along.

So I summed this up as classroom training is hard.

But, that is not to say it is a bad thing, if you do it, still do it, use screencasts as an addition to these things that can go in the tool kit.

I am a software developer, we have this little saying called dry.  Which means don’t repeat yourself, when I found myself repeatedly in places telling them the same thing.  It bothered me, how can I make it more efficient because that is what software developers do.  I started developing a user guide for WordPress, this was a pretty bad idea because it took an awful lot of my time.  Once I had finished it.  I needed to update it.  It was hard to make and time consuming and difficult for my clients to use and it was impersonal.  So, but, on the good side it was repeatable this document can be passed around people and I can share it with multiple clients or where the world publicly if I want to.

Documentation and guides.  Well, they are just a bit boring.  But, they are really useful so if that is your thing, keep doing it and there is a, I couldn’t find an official WordPress user guide which bothered me.  This is a good user guide that is kept up to date.  If you need documentation, look that up.  A note on accessibility, screencasts are videos they are visual medium.  If you create them, captioning is a great way to make them accessible.  But document can be a more accessible document for some people.  These things compliment each other.

Screencasts, I get excited at this point.  They are great, repeatable, pass them around, share them with people, they are really easy and quick to make, probably have already the tools you need to start making the screencasts which means they are cheap.  But okay, they are impersonal, they are not face to face communication with your clients and they can’t ask questions back.

But you know, there are limitations to everything.

Screencasts are awesome.

They are good for you, your clients and everyone.  I won’t do this again, but, this is just some quotes from the clients who I sent the screencasts to, really clear and very useful, I’ve not worked with the … that did this before.

“this is way better than a written document with the screen shots and the like.”

Screencasts are good for you because they are quicker and easier to produce, you can actually learn by teaching people these things as well.  So, if you fire up your little screencast program and start recording you are putting yourself in your user shoes and using WordPress as a beginner, as you explain how to use it and it is a useful exercise if nothing else, to sit down and maybe just produce a couple of introductory guides to understand what it is like to use WordPress for the first time again.

As you seen from the quotes, client pleasing and good for your reputation.

So the next step on my journey having made a user guide was well, these little videos I am making are good.  What can I do about that?  How can I build up some kind of library of training material?  I made a New Year’s resolution, to try and record a 5 minute video, explaining an aspect of WordPress, it was a New Year’s resolution, it wasn’t everyday, it fell by the wayside, I got a cold and lost my voice.  I published them at press ups, I recorded it so I could share with my clients but also set up a simple website and they sit there.  I am not here to promote this.  I am not telling you to go here and look at them because they are rubbish.  But I challenge you, is this something you can do, creating a library of short easy to produce videos.  In this case, publishing them publicly your work could be good for everyone.

Let’s move on and talk about how to make them.

You all need some things I am assuming if you use WordPress you have a computer.  Anyone not have a computer in this room?  Good.  You will need a microphone?  Where is my bag?

I should have done this before?  Most laptops have inbuilt microphones, it will pick up all sorts of noise.  The very least you can do is pull your earbuds out and assuming you have them and put them into a laptop, you could just buy a cheap head set mic and plug that in.  It is picking up less of the ambient noise from where you are, start with your built in, but rapidly progress to a head set like.  If you are getting into this and you want to improve sound quality, recommend spending like 50 quid on a USB condenser mic, this is one that I bought on eBay for about that price.  The only thing I would say about this, this is huge, this is about like professional mics are enormous, you don’t realise.  This is like 3-quarters of the height of my monitor in my office.  Ridiculous, I can’t see the screen when I am doing stuff.  But the sound quality is so much better.  In my opinion, the biggest change you can make if you are recording narrated screencasts, get yourself a decent microphone.  I have 2 small children who invade my house, well they are there pretty much all of the time.  You will need somewhere quiet.  I hope this goes out saying, yes, I don’t record screencasts from home.

You will need some software, probably already have some actually, so let’s talk through some of the software options.  This is a bit Mac centric, I haven’t explored the Linux world, if that is your thing use Google to find out more, with Mac you will have quicktime player installed.  It is also a quicktime recorder.  So, each of these tools has a short animated git screencast showing you the tool in action.  With quicktime player you can just tell it to create a screen recording and it will make a screen recording.

It is free if you have got a Mac already got it but has limited functionality, and only export your videos in a limited number of formats.

As a new tool called Kap, this is a stand alone screen recording app and it is pretty good, recording your whole screen, has nice options really easy to use, free, it has some additional export options which is handy, export animated gif.

Loom, is something you can use on a mac or windows.  It up loads your screencast to the cloud but you can then down load them again if you want to share them in another way.  There are limited formats you can down load in.  Has no editing, I found it a bit buggy, maybe that is something that will improve.  Give it a try.

If you want to take things to the next level then these software tools, the two recommended are Camtasia which is on Mac and windows and screen flow on Mac only.  These have all sorts of filters and annotating functions, do full editing with multiple tracks and just go wild.  These are professional editing tools basically, they cost kind of £60 to £100 to buy.  If you want to produce professional stuff, this is definitely the way to go.

Making animatinged GIFs is fun, if you are communicated with other developers you work with, or with an audience like this.

So all of these are recorded with the giphy capture app for Mac.  It is free, trimming capability, so chop the start and end of your video.  Limited to 30 second clips which is good in some ways bad in others, probably don’t want a gif more than 30 seconds because the file size will close.  It is gif only, it will only export gif’s.

Have you seen the film inception or know what it is about?  This is a screen grab of me using LICEcap to record giphy to record something, if you want to do something, you can record a screen recorder if you want to.  It is not much fun.

LICEcap is very, very similar to giphy it is available for windows and possibly Linux as well, Opensource app, really good, it is free, easy to use.  You can record longer than 30 second clips with it but still gif only and has no editing features at all.  You may also because your screen might not necessarily be your computer screen, you might need an emulator if you want to record a mobile screen, options for that.

If you are on a Mac, you can install this 8 gigabyte thing called X code, which is a Mac developer toad.  You will get the ios simulator, you can record that.

Android emulators a world that I stepped into occasionally, you have to be brave to do it.  They do exist, so fill in the blank.

Your web browser also has an inspector or dev tools inside of it.  Most of those have a mobile view where you can choose different device sizes.  Now this isn’t necessarily an exactly what you would see on that device.  But it is a reasonable approximation and great if you want to communicate some responsive website function or something to a client or to users.

Camtasia and screen flow, the two paid applications also have the ability to record from a mobile device if you plug it in as well, so, that might be worth playing with, if that is something you want to try and do.

So, what have we got?  Computer, we have got at least our earbuds or maybe a decent mic, software, that you have preinstalled or bought.  Recorded your screencast, a means of sharing.

All sorts of places you can self-host, YouTube and Vimeo are obvious places to upload stuff.  Remember, or if you don’t know YouTube and Vimeo have private places.  They can be listed and private and need to be logged into to be seen.  If you use these services you can also get subscriptions and feed and connect them up to mailing list and things to do distribution of the content that you are producing; you could also use something like a file transferring service like Dropbox to upload and share large files with people so you just share the video with the person and that works fine to.

Has anyone used WP help?  WP help looks a bit like this.  It let’s you create inside your WordPress dashboard a little help section, just hierarchical simple posts so what I do sometimes is I’ll create a help section for my web-sites and I will upload the videos unlisted to YouTube and just the YouTube URL in and that appears as embed in there so you can get all your video training embedded within the users web-site so that’s a really good way to do it too.

Usecases.  Mentioned these before, you can use these things for user training but you can also use them for customer support so if people ask you a question and you need to show them, for example, where the screen options are you can record a quick animated GIF.  Record it in an email and sent it back, much easier than writing out at length the steps someone has to take to do something and it’s more visual so it’s easier for them to understand.

Can also use it for software development, so if you work in a team you can use this to share visual bugs or explain to people how to use as your in-house tools.  This is one of my favourite GIF ever.  A real bug with WordPress shiny updates where I managed to get the little exclamation point to turn around which was funny.  It’s fixed now.  But this was so much easier to show this as a visual demonstration to people than to try and write, hey, that little exclamation mark thing that appears when you do this thing is spinning round, and they’re inevitably going to come back and say, yeah, right, well.  As a good example I’ll skip this but this is just me using a screencast to show someone how to use a brilliant Mac tool called Dash to look up documentation.  Some people live code, they take these gaming platforms or people livestream their gaming activity using things like twitch and I’ve known people do this with code for pair programming or getting feedback on their coding style.  So, that’s a bit extreme but it’s something you can do.

Let’s do the tips and trips.  This is like 2 years of me doing this all condensed into 7 minutes.  I’ll do my best.

Turn off notifications.  You don’t want your personal email subject lines popping up on your screen while you’re recording these things.  You can do it on a Mac from the activity centre in the top right.  Little tip if you hold down the ALT button and click that it disables it straight away.  There are options in settings in windows 8 and 10 for turning off notifications as well.  Do it.

Also great if you are presenting a talk like this.  Turn them off.

Close your applications.  People don’t want to see all of this, do you.  Close the applications.  It will slow down your computer while you’re recording and people don’t want to see this.  You probably don’t want to share information about the tools you are using.  You now know all the tools I use. Ask me about them.

Avoid private data.  This is my password manager.  This isn’t a real web-site or password, it’s fake but you don’t want this kind of stuff shared.  If you are demo-ing a live site recording from a live site you don’t want real user data being shared.  If you’re recording a staging site that’s not yet live and you intend to put that publicly somewhere that’s probably not a great idea so avoid anything you shouldn’t be sharing unless you know that you’re only privately sharing video with the people who already own that data.

One way to achieve that is to use a private install or a staging or a test site so I tend to use a local install for recording WordPress.

Clean your desktop.  This is polite and makes everything look nice even if it means create a folder that says “stuff that used to be on my desktop”.  Drag everything in it; you’ll thank me tomorrow because your desktop will be clean and 3 months later you’ll wonder where your things are.

Use a lower resolution or screen size so you can change the resolution of your screen just for your recording or capture just a small area of your screen which means rather than this huge screen with this thing going on, you’re only capturing the thing you are talking about and it’s big.  Bear in mind people might be watching this on a mobile device while commuting so it might be on a small screen they’re watching so make the thing you are demonstrating as big as possible or tell people to sit closer to you.

Use larger fonts and spacing if you are demonstrating something that involves text.  People don’t want to see this.  They want to see something more like this.  So you can increase the line spacing, increase the font size and the whole thing is much more easy for your users to read.

I tend not to prepare scripts but rather I have a list of prompts to work from.  So if I get lost or forget where I am or just get flustered in the heat of the moment when I’m recording something I know what’s coming next.

And try and keep it brief.  My opinion is that if someone posts an hour long video I’m probably not going to watch it.  So keep it to 25, 30 minutes as a maximum.  10 or 15 minute if you can.  If you are just demonstrating a short thing, try and keep it to 5 minutes and if it’s a long thing see if you can break it up into smaller chunks because people are more likely to watch it.

Learning your keyboard short cuts is really handy.  I’ll talk about staying still in a minute and it’s related to that.

At the very least learn the start and pause and stop recording shortcut for your screen recorder otherwise at the end of every video you are going to be ah how do I stop this thing and moving around and it just looks a bit messy.

I talked about being in a noisy place.  There are thing that you can do to reduce noise.  There are physical things you can do.  If you really want to you can install sound proofing or buy a little soundproofed booth.  That’s one end of the scale.  At the other end of the scale is draw the curtains because that will reduce a bit of the noise coming in from outside.

Timing can be interesting.  So, in my house at a certain time of day all the birds come and feed off the lawn and go chatter, chatter, chatter.  So there might be certain times of day when you’ll get more noise.  Some of the recording and editing tools also have noise reduction filters so if you’ve got one of those tools use that filter.  It will really help.

Stay still.  Like this is really distracting and annoying right?  So, sometimes you just want to move your mouse around and go this thing here, this is what I’m talking about! Do that as little as possible.  Try and stay still and it will help you if you are editing, if you are editing out your ums and errs, you don’t want your mouse jumping round your screen as you perform your edits, so staying still, learning to use the keyboard if you can will help with that and it will just mean – it’s bothering me now!  {Laughter} – allow pauses and allow yourself to go wrong.

This is kind of key.  If you’ve got software that allows you to edit then it’s fine to get something wrong and then – hush, right, if you can edit then you can look like you know everything because you can stop at some point in your screen cast and go I’ve forgotten how to do that thing, look it up and go back and do it and you chop out the bit where you had to look it up and you look like an absolute genius.  But even if you get flustered you can allow yourself to pause and edit out the pause.

And the other thing you can do is edit, edit, edit; chop out all that stuff but also if you are doing something like a software install that takes a long time to do, either edit that out or you can actually speed it up in some of these applications so it all happens instantaneously.

I know some people find slides that move around a bit difficult.  If that’s you, close your eyes now or look away.  Some of the editing tools let you do really crazy zooms and annotations and all sorts of flying around and whizzy stuff.  I would recommend doing that as little as possible because some people it will make them feel nauseous and I just think – it kind of sometimes helpful.  Use it wisely.

Get permission for what you’re recording and sharing.  I asked if these slides because they contained lots of recording of bits of WordPress would be GPL because I am recording this GPL licensed software so on my slides now GPL.  Turns out we think they’re not but get permission if you need to for the things you are sharing.  There might be copyright issues or privacy issues so just bear that in mind.

So I live in this place called Swindon that has this roundabout and I end my presentations with a “which way now?” slide.  And I only have one thing to say about that which is go for it.  I will share these slide’s I have introduced you to the tools many of which you already have installed or in your bag.  Yes, just go and give it a try.  You don’t need to share your initial efforts but practice, practice, releasing stuff to clients initially because that’s really helpful, may then be something you really get into and decide to share more publicly with the world I’ve had a lot of funding.  It’s great just firing up a tool and doing a quick screen recording and it’s transformed the way I communicate with my clients for the better.  So yes hopefully it will all go and next week you’ll be playing around with these tools and making screen casts.  Thanks for listening.

There is one more talk before the end of WordCamp so go and enjoy that.  {Applause} I’ll take questions.

SAM: We do have time for questions.  We’ve got 10 minutes so if anyone has got any questions?

FROM THE FLOOR: Hi, sometimes screencasts have content where the presenter is doing something good related and they press shortcuts but obviously on a video I wouldn’t be able to tell whether they pressed command A but there is a small something that will display that command A has been pressed.  Do you know what that is?

ROSS WINTLE: Yes, so the more advanced tools they actually record your mouse movement and keyboard clicks.  They record them and install them separately and you can turn them on so you can turn on a display of the keys you pressed normally, so yes, but normally only in the more advanced tools.  Mouse clicks.  So some of my little GIFs here showed a little bubble when you clicked the mouse.  Most of the tools will record that and display those and it’s optional to turn them on and off.

FROM THE FLOOR: Hi.  Great talk.  I use a lot of screencasts as well.  My question is more about if you are sharing longer videos, like YouTube would make sense for that but those little short 30 second GIFs you send as a support thing, how do you share that with the client?  Is it a Dropbox link or keep them all then go back to them?

ROSS WINTLE: It depends how I’ve been asked so if it’s a customer support request by email you can embed it or attach it to the email and back it goes. One of the organisations I work with has a support system, so you can just drag and drop or paste it as an attachment into there.  For larger things like if you’ve recorded a longer 15 minute MP 4 video file that’s going to be bigger, it probably won’t fit in an email, depending what email system you use, so upload it to somewhere like retransfer and send it.  Generally with the GIFs – or you can tweet a GIF.  So you can provide customer support through twitter with animated GIFs which is cool.

SAM: I’ve seen stuff like that with developers they’ve found a cool trick at upload it to twitter and share it with everyone and get lots of likes.  Any more questions?  Where’ve you been?!

FROM THE FLOOR: It’s more of an addition than a question.  There is a screenshot sharing service called cloud app APB not Automattic’s cloud up which is UB which now let’s you record GIFs from screen then just instantly give your shortcut for it as well.

ROSS WINTLE: Sure.  The giphy app let’s you upload – can I run it?  Hold on.  See what happens if I do this.  Mirror this.  I promised myself I wouldn’t do a live demo.  So, here is giphy capture.  This is great you just literally click the button, off it goes, it records whatever I’m doing, blah, blah, blah, stop, and then down the bottom – it was just my background and my mouse so there it is.  You can hit edit, change the size of it, the looping option, change the frames per second, add a caption, then these thing you trim then once you are done you can save, you can upload to giphy and once you are uploaded you can share with any of those sharing services.  That’s a really quick and easy way to do animated GIFs and make them public.

FROM THE FLOOR: Is there any software that allows you to create chapters in a screencast?  This is the thing that sometimes I go to look for documentation. I’m a fast reader but if I’m listening to a screencast, I’m limited to the speed at which the person reads and if it’s 25 minutes long I think, blimey, that’s 25 minutes of my day.  I’ve not seen that anywhere and you haven’t mentioned anything, it seems like a really obvious one.  Does that exist?  Skip to GIFs you are interested in skip to these sections?

ROSS WINTLE: It’s not something I’ve tried.  YouTube will let you create indexes.  You can create links to specific times within a YouTube video.  Vimeo probably let’s you do the same, so if you use that service you can probably create a table of contents where everything is.  It may be some of the bigger screen recording tools will let you annotate in that sort of way.  I don’t know.  But yes we can look that up if you want to come and have a play later.

SAM: A question at the back?  Somebody put their hand up earlier.

FROM THE FLOOR: Thanks for the talk.  Do you have quick tips about screenflow?  Because I haven’t used that before, so is it by default really good or do you have quick tips how you use it?

ROSS WINTLE: It is worth watching – so, the people who make screenflow, Telerik have introductory training videos, so the tip is spend half an hour watching some of those.  You can pick it up and do the recording really easily but if you want to play with editing tools, filters and adaptations it’s really worth watching their screen cast user guides and finding out from there how to do it but in its basic form it is very easy to make a recording and export it.  If you want to play around with the more advanced features then follow their learning path.

SAM: Any more questions?

ROSS WINTLE: Or if you really want to get going, find me afterwards.

FROM THE FLOOR: It’s not a question; it’s more like an addition.  I like i-movie to edit my {inaudible} record them in quick time.  I would avoid to use shortcuts because they’re different on Windows than on Mac especially if you do something for beginners to {inaudible} shortcuts {inaudible} what is this shortcut like? I have no idea.  So I would not really recommend this and also, like, editing for me, I find it really annoying, so I try to not take so much M and stuff like this but – after a while, okay, there is a mistake; doesn’t matter, it’s just like more {inaudible} I don’t care, so, yeah.

ROSS WINTLE: Really good tips.  There is a certain amount of personal preference.  I, for some reason, love editing.  It’s mindful.  Like some people love colouring books.  My video editing is my mindfulness.  I can spend hours editing video.  But other people may want to try and do it all in one take and not edit and develop some strategies for doing that.  Tip about using i-movie which is in called on any new Mac you buy and with the keyboard shortcuts there is a certain amount of knowing your audience.  So, there will be times when I deliberately right click to do something because I know that my user base aren’t going to use a keyboard shortcut to do that.  They’re going to want to see how did you do that and the way to show how to do that is to do the right click and show the thing being used in the menu then assume the user will then go and learn the keyboard shortcut afterwards if they need to so thank you and have been doing this for a little while but I’m not the expert, there are lots of good tips out there.  So, yes, any more tips, contribute!

SAM: Good.  Any more questions?  Cool.  Thank you very much.

ROSS WINTLE: Grab me if you want demos. I’ll be around.  {Applause}.

SAM: Excellent.  So now we’ve got the last break of the day before we finish.  The luggage room is now open so if you want to collect your bags you could do it now before going to the next session because there will probably be a bit of a queue after the closing remarks.

A reminder again to go and collect your teeshirts if you definitely want your own size otherwise you can pick one up at the end.  Then we’ll be back here at 3.30.  Thank you.  Back here at 3.30 for Nela Dunato who will be talking about design processes and ending design revision hell.

Thank you.