Dahling, Call Me
How creating learning videos is just like working in Hollywood.
This blog post is part of the Trailhead content creator series. Follow The Trailblazer publication to read the entire series.
Creating user assistance videos may sound a little humdrum, but the truth is the process is much closer to Hollywood movie-making than you might think. If you’re considering adding videos to your user assistance, then it’s time to chomp on a cigar and have a seat in the producer’s office, find your muse at the scriptwriter’s desk, and get comfy in the editor’s cutting room. Because you’ll fill all of these roles and more to turn out great video.
The Producer
Like any Hollywood producer, your biggest concern is your box office. Box office is the commercial success of a movie in terms of the audience size or takings it commands. That all depends on how many theaters are showing your movie. For you this translates to where and how people are going to access your video. You’d better have a plan in mind before you do anything else. If a movie plays to an empty theater, does it even exist?
The @salesforcedocs video team work with technical writers to get our video links in the user interface, help trays, and help topics. We make sure our technical support team have our videos in their quiver of resources. We partner with customer success teams to make sure our content is in our onboarding programs. And we work with our marketing team to feature our content on the Salesforce YouTube channel. We aim for “national distribution” of each video for as long a run as possible.
The Scriptwriter
One reason I don’t suffer Writer’s Block is that I don’t wait on the muse, I summon it at need.
— Piers Anthony
Hopefully, your user assistance videos don’t fall under the science fiction and fantasy category, like Piers Anthony’s books (although never say never). But just like Piers, you too have the muse at your command. Everything you need to know about writing a good script — the audience, the motivation and journey, the storylines — is at your fingertips in the data your company regularly gathers about your customers. You just need to start schmoozing, heavily.
Here’s a table that breaks down where the @salesforcedocs video team spend most of our schmooze-time when we’re not in the studio:
To write a script, pick a top customer pain point. Use that to determine your learning objectives, (1 or 2 is just right for a 2- to 5-minute video). Get all collaborators to agree on these objectives. Using a real-life scenario that your training or support team provide, flesh out the story using what you know about your customer personas and their motivation. In a perfect world, we’d get to create a video about every aspect of our product, but time and budget say otherwise. When choosing our storylines, we find the following guidelines lead to the most effective videos:
- It’s more than clicks, it’s concepts.
- It’s a complex setup/procedure.
- It has visual elements that are hard to describe using only text.
- It’s not a perfect world. We need to explain troubleshooting.
The Editor
There’s a reason that editing is its own category in the Oscars®. Use your learning objectives to keep a video script in scope and trim out excess information. With your learning objectives agreed upon by all stakeholders, the inevitable cat-herding becomes much easier. A subject matter expert wants to add some additional material? A product manager decides your video is a good place for extra notes about the feature? Grasp your script, point out the learning objectives, and with your ever-handy red pen, cross that extra stuff out! Feels good, doesn’t it?
Our team requires learning objectives at the top of every script or we don’t start production.
The Wrap
Those three job roles will get you started on your way to creating top-drawer user assistance video. I wish I had more room to describe for you how subject matter experts are like divas, how Twitter praise is truly the equivalent of a red carpet moment, and how an indie budget won’t prevent you from turning out blockbuster content. (Did someone say sequel?) In the meantime, when people ask you what you do at your job, have no shame in telling them that what you do is a lot like working in Hollywood. Then say, “Call me, dahling!”
Interested in learning more? Come to our session at Dreamforce and learn how to write the Trailhead way.
How to Write the Trailhead Way
- Tuesday, October 4; 2:30–2:50pm PT
- Moscone West, Admin Meadow Theater
Can’t make it in-person? The session won’t be streamed, but we’ll be posting the materials afterward on the Success Community in the Trailhead group.
