How to Make a More Personal Tutorial

We have a lot of tutorials on GCFLearnFree.org, and I’ve worked on dozens of them during my time as an instructional designer. Our team always strives to provide clear and concise information on a wide range of topics — our Microsoft Office, Computer Basics, and Facebook tutorials come to mind. But we’ve also spent a good part of the past few years looking for more ways to bring our own voice to the content we create.

This has meant a lot of different things over this time, and we believe it has resulted in some really memorable, funny, and unique tutorials — in other words, the kind of content you won’t find anywhere but GCFLearnFree.org.

Embracing the medium

When we decided to write a new tutorial to explain the basics of using YouTube, we asked ourselves that same question: How can we make this tutorial more uniquely ours? How can we add our own voice and commentary while still providing a lot of high-quality information? Part of the answer turned out to be a new series of videos, like the one below:

We created these videos because wanted to embrace the medium and culture of YouTube. In other words, we wanted to teach YouTube with YouTube videos, and we hope you find a certain immediacy to them — something more personal than text and images alone can offer.

Making our very own videos

Of course, creating these videos wasn’t quite as easy as we thought it might be. First off, there was a lot of setup to do:

We wanted these videos to look like they were created on the fly, not in a fancy recording studio.

And while that was basically the case, we did use a few tricks from our videographers to make them look as nice as possible (note the big lights, tripod, and external microphone) without looking overproduced.

To that end, we recorded the videos with the front-facing camera of an iPhone 5. We felt this was something average users might be able to afford and use themselves (compared to, say, an expensive DSLR or dedicated video camera). And even after setting everything up, there was still the problem of recording without messing up.

Trust me, I did plenty of that:

After several recording sessions, a lot of line flubbing, and a bit of simple editing, we were able to create some videos that I’m excited to include in our tutorial.

Sharing our story

Another big part of finding our new voice — these things that make GCFLearnFree.org stand out from other free learning sites on the Web — is sharing our experiences with you. We want to be more open and honest about how we create our tutorials. That’s really the inspiration behind this post: to give you a behind-the-scenes look at what we do, and why we do it.

So please, let us know how you feel about this project! And if there’s something else you’d like us to try — or that you want to know about how we work at GCFLearnFree — let us know. We’ll always be ready to answer any questions or concerns you may have.