Title: Seriously - to all you budding video stars out there with the video tutorials on how to use your product:<p>- I can read faster than you can talk.<p>- I need information, not personality.<p>By the time you've finished introducing yourself, I'm already frustrated. The online video medium may be great for bloggers, but when I'm seeking information, everything else is a distraction.<p>The use of text to provide information has two main advantages (that I can think of right away):<p>1. It's silent - no extraneous noise to disturb others.<p>2. It's repeatable - no need to scrub back and forth to absorb something that may not have been clear the first time.<p>The first time I can remember being subjected to a video tutorial was for Rails documentation, which apparently decided to eschew text for some over-produced video introduction. I'm probably not the typical user, but that one omission has pretty much put me off of Rails since the beginning.<p>The most recent offender is Apple, with some demo video on setting up an iTunes account (w/o credit card) which guarantees I have to give up 4-10 minutes of my life that I will never get back, without any guarantee of getting the information I need.<p>While I point out two examples, there are many, many more out there where video/animation/flashiness is the primary or only method of documentation. A tutorial video should always be a secondary method of providing information, never the first.<p>Really, it looks great: nice titles, expensive animation, very creative. Now, what are you trying to hide?<p>Remember: I can read faster than you can talk.
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