Are Video Tours / Screencasts Worthwhile?
Anthony and I have been thinking a lot about screencasts / video tours lately in an effort to better explain the benefits of a user account on Hype Machine (you can enjoy most of the site sans-account).
I recently added a very simple graphic to our about page and empty user account pages to explain how to favorite stuff, but we haven’t truly explained the why yet. I’ll be doing a blog post on it soon, but we’ve been contemplating creating/paying for a screencast. There are some very talented people out there doing awesome work in this niche.
Anthony’s stance is that if it needs a video to explain something, you may be doing something wrong. I mostly agree, but also know that people are lazy and in this high-bandwidth world, clicking play is easier than reading a bunch of text.
Do you watch video tours and if so are there any that particularly caught your attention as particularly valuable over plain text/screenshots?
The following are some examples of screencasts I enjoyed:
Screencast of Twitter (created by Common Craft)
Screencast of Mahalo (created by Demogirl)
Screencast of DataPortability (created by Smashcut Media)
Screencast of Google Checkout (created by Google)