I just wanted to share a post from Nancy from Bright Wings. She gave some reasons why she hates videos from a customer perspective.  And I agree for all the same reasons.

Now, it’s not really hating the video itself, its more about “disliking” the way the product is implemented using video. I’d like for you to please think about her feedback before jumping on the video creation bandwagon and think about your customer for a moment. Here I will provide some solutions:

1. Not being able to start and stop the video to review it at a later time.

In longer videos, there will be times your viewer will need to stop the video for a moment to do something else. They might return a few minutes later, they might return the following week. But having to sit through the whole video AGAIN (especially if you’re at the 45 minute mark of a 50 minute video), is not very cool.  You want to be sure to have a playbar on your video that includes a play/pause button and scrollbar (the little doohickey that you can slide back and forth).

2.Video-only products with multiple, long videos.

So you have a lot of information to share, but it’s only in video format. That means your viewer will have to sit in front of their computer for a number of hours to get your information. Think about it, is that really fair?  How will they refer back to something they remember you saying in your video? Try providing transcripts with your video. This is much easier for people to be able to open the PDF and search for specific information they want to review, allows them to get your information while away from their computers, and even better – provide an extra added value to your product.

3. Videos take too long to load.

This issue is due to a combination of the size/length of the video, how it was made, the quality, the format and the software used to create it and even where and how it’s stored online!  It’s a stuggle for all people who create video for use online.  Much of the issue comes from people making their videos too long and at a high quality. Sure we want to provide lots of information and we want it to look good, but if you are delivering online you will need to compromise.  I won’t go into details about all the different options because that’s outside of the scope of this discussion, but my suggestion is to play around with shorter videos, smaller dimensions and lowering the quality.

4. Videos stop in the middle of playing at times.

Again, this is related to #3 above. But this also has to do a lot with the server and “bandwidth” that the video is being run from.  Depending on the format your video is saved in, you can have your video run from a “streaming” video server or media server.  It’s like a webhost that only hosts videos. You get speed because that is what their servers are made for.  Many times people will stream large videos onto their own personal shared hosting accounts.  This can work, but with great decline in performance and loading. My suggestion is to find a low cost video streaming service if you plan on creating a lot of video products. Also, keep in mind that not all of your customers will have high speed computers or connections and that will cause a lot of stalling with videos as well.

I hope this helps to understand some things about video from a customer’s perspective. We always think about it from our perspective as a content creator – but in the end, its really the customer’s product because we already know the stuff!

Filed under: Product Creation

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