Innovative Approaches to Product Tutorials: From Text to Interactive Video

If you are the inventor of a unique product, it might seem natural to you how the product should be used. However, this might not be so obvious to first-time users. And relaying how to use a product to people who only speak a foreign language can be especially challenging.
Therefore, you should think carefully about creating product tutorials that work to encourage users to utilize products to their full potential. This can be the key to not only customer success, but improved brand recognition and increased sales. There are different kinds of interactive tutorials that serve different purposes. Depending on your goals, you should focus more on one type rather than the other. Let’s take a closer look at some innovative approaches to product tutorials from experts in the field. 

Benefits of interactive tutorials

Interactive tutorials can actually make a big difference in your business. You might think them secondary to the products themselves, but you’d be surprised at the extent to which people give up on things that they don’t readily understand.
And beyond lack of understanding, people have greater respect for companies that take their products seriously. Creating interactive tutorials is a great way to do this.
When it comes to your staff, creating tutorials will similarly be to your benefit. You will spend less time assigning people to teach your staff new things, and the tutorials will be available in the future for people to view when they need to.

Interactive walkthroughs and interactive product tutorials

Two of the main types of interactive tutorials are interactive walkthroughs and product tutorials. In the sections below, we will take a closer look at both of them.

Interactive walkthroughs for new users

Interactive product walkthroughs are ways of illustrating to new users what the important components of a program are. Unlike tutorials, they require users to take advantage of the software in question to utilize walkthroughs in order to make their way through the steps of a program.
You can create interactive walkthroughs that serve different purposes. They can work across platforms and applications and are very user-friendly. They do not require coding knowledge to use. You can create effective walkthroughs that can include:

• Employee training. Walkthrough software can help employees with user onboarding, learning new procedures, or any other internal training that they might have to undergo. This helps guide them through the user journey of learning new company policies, gauge user progress, or come onboard for the first time.
• Learning new software. With walkthrough software, employees can be guided step by step through the process of learning new software, from the welcome screen to the final stage. Because walkthrough software forces users to take active steps to make it through a process of user segments, it assists greatly in ensuring that users understand the processes in question.
• Customer learning. Walkthrough software can also help customers learn how to use websites and apps to their advantage and get the most out of them for increased customer success. They utilize customer data for maximum efficiency. You can find product walkthrough examples of customer learning by searching for them.

Product tutorials

The other major category of interactive videos are product tutorials. There are several types of product tutorials that you can create interactive to guide users, depending on your goals. Let’s take a closer look at a few of them.

One-touch components

As the name implies, one-touch components focus on specific aspects of product usage that might be difficult or complicated for users. Put together, they will compose a full guide. 

• Tooltips. Tooltips are explanations of individual parts of a product’s key features. Rather than being guides on usage, they are more generally explanatory in nature. They aim to show the benefits of product parts.
• Hotspots. Hotspots are ways of emphasizing new or unique parts of a product in their UI elements. In creating hotspot touchpoints, you can use various kinds of digital key features, visual and/or audio elements to make these components stand out.
• Pop-ups. Pop-ups are windows that appear while a user is on a screen that prompts them to take a particular action.
• Temporary cards. Temporary cards are small portions of a screen that are devoted to new product key features. They are called temporary because you can open and close them at will, depending on your individual needs.
• Behavior tutorials. Behavior tutorials are animated features that pop up to let you know what you need to do to manipulate unique features of a given product.
• Task lists. Task lists are interactive lists that allow users to follow steps to achieve a particular goal. They assess the learning curve that a given user makes end route to achieving the goal in question, and therefore keep people focused on the task at hand and what exactly they need to do.

Full guides

Another category of product tutorials is full guides. These are guides that offer all the touch components together in a way that will explain every aspect of a given product to users that they can access through web apps or mobile apps.
Full guides are full-fledged product tours. Product tours are a great way to give users an interactive walkthrough of a given product. They often combine many of the touch points mentioned above.
Everything depends on your goal. If you have a staff of people that are likely to have difficulty with a new procedure, then interactive walkthroughs are preferable. These are ways of ensuring that people really learn the procedures necessary to master something. Similarly, if you run a client portal that is challenging to use, interactive walkthroughs are a good way to ensure that customers aren’t constantly coming to you with questions.
If, on the other hand you add new features to a given tool or product, it might be better to use a product tutorial. In this case, you won’t necessarily be assuming that people will find it difficult to master the product in question, but you want to make the product and its various parts available to them in a clear way.

What about translating into other languages, and gaining user feedback?

Figuring out user feedback features might seem like a large task at first, but it isn’t that complicated.
You can find a video translator who will lay out everything for you clearly. Once you choose the languages that you want to translate into, simply type in your text and produce your translation. Then you can have your product videos available in all the languages that you need.
This will make it easier for users to provide feedback on their experience with products. If language is a barrier, you will never really know how people fared.

Conclusion

If you’re not sure whether to include product tutorials for your products, services, and procedures, the answer is always yes. Technology is now able to make things visually easy and interesting for anyone who has access to a device. It would be to your advantage to utilize this technology and make your staff and customers more satisfied with their experiences.