Double Screencast Success

Northeast based agency Indigo have a UK wide portfolio of clients, many of whom return to utilise the skills of the Indigo team time and time again. For Indigo developing ongoing relationships with clients and providing up to the minute solutions is integral to their continued success, as one of the regions foremost newmedia agencies.

Recently UK Sport and n-e-life have once again turned to Indigo to help them find cost effective solutions to deliver end-user technical support for software applications. At the heart of the challenge was the need by both organisations to provide comprehensive training to multiple users across a large geographic area.

Both clients were looking for a medium to engage learners away from the more traditional approaches such as workshop or seminar style. Which require not only physical and financial outlay but often do not take into account an individual’s learning style or pace. The team at Indigo suggested utilising the increasingly popular phenomena of “screencasting”, as a way of meeting both their needs.

For uninitiated, screencasts are movies that capture tasks performed on a computer and in essence they can provide powerful communication and training tools. Essentially they are a video that combines demos of key technical tasks, using the screen layout an end user would see. Screencasts are an excellent way to give an overview of a concept or to show users how given tasks are accomplished in a specific software environment.

“Well-constructed video and audio components can make a topic more engaging than written instructions or static images, while appealing to differing end user learning styles.” Comments John Adams, project director at Indigo, who goes on to add ; “We are finding that end users want to learn how to use software applications as if they were sitting side by side with the expert.  Addressing them in the first person creates a more intimate and less formal link with the onscreen learning.  It is also important to encourage that friendly feel; we want the learning to be approachable, quick to master and a valuable resource.”

While both clients have different software applications and very different target audiences, both are embracing screencasting and the skills and expertise of the Indigo team in this area. Ian Cawley of UK Sport comments; ”Screencasts provide another useful method for us to educate athletes in the use of our online whereabouts system. It is vital that athletes understand exactly how to use the system, and this is a positive step forward in getting the right information to them in a user-friendly manner.”

Increasingly organisations are using screencasts for a number of persuasive purposes; they can effectively demonstrate how to use a software application, project or website and are a useful way of documenting FAQ’s on procedures, and software applications. Given the associated costs of instructor led training, screencasting can offer a cost effective means of imparting high–quality knowledge based training. Screencasts can easily be tailoured to suit the needs of external and internal users and they are certainly less resource heavy to produce than creating huge training manuals.

To find out more on screencasting and how it could help your organisation deliver cost effective online software training programmes, allowing an unlimited number of users to learn in their own time, from any location, please call John Adams here at Indigo on 0191 209 2100.

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