Text-based guides are just easier to follow along. Video is great in short bursts. When you’re heads down learning something new though, I find text guides to be far superior.
Wait, you what now?
YouTube is a great site, don’t get me wrong (except for, you know, the Google of it all). There’s endless piles of content available at your fingertips (both good and bad. Ok, mostly bad). Want to learn about a new programming language? Need a refresher on accounting? Want to actually figure out what underwater basket weaving is all about? You got it!
But you know what? How am I supposed to do the thing that I’m learning how to do if I’m focused on finding the right spot in the video? The 30 second “this is the thing, this is how do it, the end” videos are the exception here (not that many of those really exist – thanks SEO).
I find it far easier to read through a service manual, technical documentation, or even just a forum post with community-source discussions around a problem. You can search for keywords directly in your browser, bookmark the page, copy the text down to your own devices, hell, even break out the ol’ printer (you do have ink, right?) and make a hard copy.
It gives us time to chew on it, go at our own pace, and get the content that we need. A 40 minute tutorial on something that takes less than 10 minutes to complete if you know all of the steps just seems like a waste of time if you ask me.
But isn’t video all the rage now?
Yeah, it sure is. SEO, advertising, sponsors. All of those are a dime a dozen now with videos. Much like the small web, good luck finding the niche videos in your searches. Thanks to the popularity of monetizing our hobbies, every video we tend to see now is generally 15 minutes or longer. And since you can’t search through videos, good luck finding the thing you needed quickly. Hopefully the video you just clicked on has chapters bookmarked in the description for you to skip to.
So yeah, to all those tech writers, you’re doing great work and just know that we appreciate you. It’s not easy work (let me tell you how much I love writing documentation). But it’s absolutely essential to being able to easily digest information on our time, not at the advertisers time.
What are your thoughts on this? Feel free to hit me up about it in my email on my Contact page.