Shorter Demos = Better Demos (I hope!)

We have a large number of Flash demos available, mostly because we hope these can serve as tutorials for users who want to learn more about a particular feature. These demos were all built using Wink, which is a fairly simple, almost low-tech tool for building Flash demos. (It is available free for Windows.)

Building demos is tremendously time-consuming: a 2-minute demo could take several hours to put together using Wink, if you want to do it well. When you are trying to showcase a collaboration tool like Kerika, part of the challenge is figuring out the exact storyline you want to have in a demo, and then setting up different machines to play their parts in developing this story.

For example, if you are showing how to share a project, you need to set up the project, set up the other machines to simulate other Kerika users, and then carefully walk through the process of capturing the action. You end up with a tremendous amount of screen captures because Wink, by default, captures 4 frames per second. And if you are not careful Wink's memory consumption can kill your PC altogether leaving you empty-handed!

As a result of frequent use I have become fairly adept at using Wink, and we have customized it somewhat to match Kerika's color palette and style. The problem of editing down the hundreds of frames (screen captures) to make a coherent, smooth presentation is still a very time-consuming one. It is possible that some of the more professional tools make some of this easier, but the top-end tools from companies like Macromedia are not only expensive, they can also be very intimidating for newbies.

After spending all these hours and days getting our demos ready, I hadn't really considered that perhaps our demos were too long-winded, in part because I had always considered them to be tutorials as much as marketing collateral. (And this was undoubtedly a mistake in hindsight because tutorials and marketing collateral are intended for very different audiences.)

It was only in the past week that I realized that our most important demo, the Overview, was way too long to serve as marketing collateral. It turned out to be the longest of all our demos since it clocked in at over 8 minutes.

I spent the past couple of days timing each demo's duration (which I had never really done before), and then editing them as ruthlessly as I could to make them shorter. I hope the results are worth the loss of frames: each demo is approximately half as long as it was before!

I have also created a new Intro demo which I hope will work better as marketing collateral, particularly for first-time visitors to our web site. This is a hacked-down version of the Overview demo, and it clocks in at 2 minutes and 45 seconds... (Do you think this is short enough?)