Designed for Use, 2nd Edition

Screencasts

Screencasts are a great tool for introducing new products or new features of existing products. If you’re working on a design, think about how you would present it in a screencast. What hook could you use to get people interested in a feature? Is there a specific problem that you could show how to solve in a screencast? Can you explain the new feature in a linear narrative?

If you have a prototype, go ahead and create a screencast explaining how it works. You don’t have to publish it; merely creating the screencast will probably alert you to issues with your design. (If you can’t come up with a problem to solve in the screencast, maybe the feature doesn’t need to exist at all.) What’s more, this is great practice for when your product ...