After announcing our attendance at Creativeworld 2024, in Frankfurt, our team members have been exploring the product tutorials of several companies attending the fair. From PDF, blogposts to videos, we have created a StepAlong for each, offering our own vision of the instructions and tutorials that we’ve found.
From PDF to StepAlong
The PDF format is the most common ways to share instructions. It offers a convenient and universal solution for presenting information with consistent formatting across different devices and platforms. Additionally, PDFs are easily downloadable and printable, accessible for users who prefer offline access to tutorials.
The use of illustrations is very much interlinked with paper manuals or PDF. Considered a great idea to make a recognisable branding through specific images, they are hard to make efficiently, and needs a very specific type of dedication to come up with good illustrated instructions. In this particular case, Piximakey, the product is a brilliant combination between a stop-motion video making app and a set for animating clay characters. Piximakey made great branding efforts, with clear and recognisable illustrations that bring a lot of value to the instructions.
For this particular product, a StepAlong brings more focus to each step, compared to the PDF which has everything together in one page.
From Blogpost to StepAlong
The use of photos for instructions is key to a blogpost. Incorporating images enhances clarity, helping learners in understanding complex actions. Nevertheless, photos are generally present in PDF instructions, or in Blogposts; to accompany text. Blogpost tutorials are usually more focussed on marketing and SEO, but can still bring a good amount of support to the product user. It’s important to mention that a good blog tutorial can take time to product, and the result is often relating depends to the quality of the website (UI, navigation, structure etc) where is it posted.
The ESSDEE Fabric Lino Printing Kit is quite original: a lino block that you can carve, dig into ink, and press onto fabric. The fact that you can cut it any shape you want is convenient, but the tutorial brings you a specific shape that you can try yourself, which is most welcome to test the product for the first time. The product is easy to set up, and ESDEEE has many similar products that are user friendly, with great results.
As blogposts depend on the quality of the website they are part of – which can be a tricky point – StepAlong makes this tutorial more accessible, especially on smartphones, and makes it more pleasable to the eye.
From Video to StepAlong
Finally, the video format is usually the most time consuming and the more expert type of tutorial, and the more misunderstood as well. Video allows for a combination of visual, sound, and sometimes textual elements, offering a dynamic approach. Video tutorials are particularly beneficial for demonstrating hands-on tasks, software usage, or any content that benefits from real-time visualisation, but sometimes can bet hard to follow for the user, because of they have to continuously start-stop the video while they complete the tasks. And of course it requires a lot of effort to build it.
At Derivan you can find many different kinds of paints for face & body, or fabrics, with many tutorials at your disposition. The best news is that they frequently update their page and their newsletter with new ones. The product we chose is a simple face paint that you can mix with glitter for a terrific look, ideal for disguises.
The StepAlong we have made brings a well organised structure and uses the video in a way that the user can follow at their own pace.
If you think our solution could benefit your organisation or would like to talk to us about your process and challenges in making product tutorials and instructions, reach out to us without delay!
Recommended post: Turn your Instagram how-tos and tutorials into StepAlongs.
