I work in User Experience/Customer Relations at NetSecure Technologies. In that capacity, one of my major tasks has been to prepare and execute support materials. A security product is useless if customers cannot or will not use it, so teaching people how to use the product is especially important.

Psychologists have argued (quite effectively) that different people employ different learning styles. Personally, I learn best when I can read something - give me a book and I can become an expert fairly quickly (strangely, I have much more difficulty absorbing information if I read it online). Other people learn best when they can hear something. And still other people learn best when they can actually try something out. Customer support is about supporting people the way they need to be supported - there is no room for ego, and no room for, "well, this works for me" thinking. So, I have tried to employ as many different learning styles as possible in all of my support materials.

One of the problems we ran into is one of method. How can you teach someone to use a credit card reader if they are a little bit nervous about the technology? Asking people to 'try something out' with their own credit card seems a little bit disrespectful, don't you think?

So, we started working on tutorial videos. While preparing tutorial videos, I was lucky enough to try out a multitude of tools. I tried out several different tools but could not find a single one that got the results I was looking for. But, then I was lucky enough to download and try out a wonderful freeware tool called Wink.

Wink has many, many benefits. My favourite part of Wink is the degree to which it can be customized. An ambitious user has complete control over every minute detail - from the colour and shape of callouts, to the appearance of every single frame in the presentation. The Wink workflow is incredibly efficient - rather than shooting video, you are capturing frames at a variable frame rate. Basically, this means that you can edit individual frames and direct people to an exact point in the presentation. Setting up and using hotspots is abnormally simple - with Wink in your arsenal, you can generate professional looking Flash tutorials by simply dragging and dropping elements. Finally, the quality of the documentation is extraordinarily good - Wink is definitely not one of those undocumented, trial and error tools. It feels professional, and it behaves like extremely expensive software.

The downsides are fairly minor. First off, there is a learning curve to Wink, but there is a learning curve in almost every piece of software available. And second, there are a few minor robustness issues that, if fixed, would make this product a million times better.

In conclusion, Wink is a wonderful tool that I can highly recommend to anyone who is interested in shooting a user-driven tutorial. But don't just take my word for it, why don't you try out the first draft of one of my tutorial videos? I will warn you, the final will be quite different than this and almost every callout I used was 'stock', however, this will give you an idea of some of the functionality. To check out the tutorial, please click on the image below - the tutorial is hosted on a development server and the presentation will open up in a new window. Please let me know what you think and feel free to follow me on Twitter.