S4E10 Optimizing Visual Content in Technical Documentation with Daniel Foster

Zohra: 0:08

Hello listeners, welcome to Inside Techcom with your host, zohra Mudabana, in season 4, I hope to bring to you different perspectives and interests that intersect with our field. Let's get started. Hello listeners, welcome to another episode of Inside Techcom with Zohra Mudabana. Today I have a very interesting guest. His name is Daniel Foster and he is the Director of Strategy at TechSmith. If you haven't heard about TechSmith or the products they make, then I think you should definitely go check it out, because it's products that we use in our industry are very well known, so it's my honor to welcome Daniel on my show. Hey, Daniel, how are you doing today?

Daniel: 0:59

I'm doing very well. Thanks so much for having me on. It's really an honor to be here.

Zohra: 1:03

It's equally an honor, Daniel, tell us about yourselves.

Daniel: 1:06

I guess I'll start with the part that's most relevant to my current role. You mentioned TechSmith. That's the company I'm at. We're based in mid-Michigan. I landed here after spending some time on the West Coast in another software company role and I was looking for a way to move back to the Midwest to be near family. Honestly. So my career at TechSmith that time I was a marketing writer, so I was all into words. I know some of your audience might be very into words. That's where I got my start. I was just writing all the other stuff that the customers would receive, so I sometimes talk about it as the dark side. I was on the dark side but, yeah, over the years I ended up getting involved as TechSmith tried to figure out. Right now, ai is like everything in the world on fire.

Daniel: 1:50

Well, in the early 2000, mid-2000s, when I was starting at TechSmith, it was social media.

Daniel: 1:56

So that was the big craze right, and so our company needed to figure out how do we adapt, what do we do here, how do we make this valuable for the business and the customers?

Daniel: 2:04

So I ended up heading up our social media strategy and team built the team basically of like crowd sourced internal folks that I would get to help me monitor Twitter and all the other platforms and help customers. So I might have met some of you, some of your listeners, there on the socials over those years. And then eventually I found my way into a product side role and then to a strategy specialization within that. So I've been working in and around Snagit since about 2014-15, had that privilege of going to a lot of different shows, so I got out on the road to STC Summit and LavaCon and even got to go to one in India at one point and was at Megacom and Israel at one point. So that's been fun to meet a lot of folks who are probably among your audience, who are thinking every day about how to make your customer successful by creating top notch content that's super clear, easy to follow and helps them love the product they're using.

Zohra: 3:03

Thank you, Daniel. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. But I want to start with the dark side. From my perspective, and I think I can speak for most technical communicators, we do not look at marketing as the dark side. That said we do look to collaborate, which is sometimes hard, but we are here today to kind of see how we can collaborate. So one thing that I think in my experience I've experienced with marketing is there is a lot of collaboration between the dark side and the bright side.

Daniel: 3:32

Just for fun.

Zohra: 3:34

Let's you know. We talk about the funnel and how information flows from marketing through TechCom and then out to the end user. And when you think about that content, there has to be a lot of, I guess, collaboration, synergy between we are not working in silos In the back end. There is a lot of collaboration that needs to happen in my opinion and unfortunately that does not happen. But since you brought up the dark side, I'm like hey, you know what? We are all on the same side. It's all about creating content.

Daniel: 4:04

Yeah, it's all in service of the customer right, and we've actually seen trends over the years where we're not the only ones to observe it, but a lot of people. Now, when they check out a product and I do this myself I go look at the dots right. If I'm really interested in digging deep into what this product is capable of and how easy it is to use. Sure, I watch the marketing videos for an overview, but I go look at the documentation, the guides, to understand sort of the next level.

Zohra: 4:31

So, and that's a pretty common behavior, yeah, actually, that's an interesting point because I think recently, very recently, as recent as probably early this week I was looking at, I was reading a, I was just looking at my LinkedIn feed and I came across a post by a content creator who mentioned marketing. It's a one-time interaction with the client. Once you're, you're trying to advocate and promote your product, but your technical content, your product documentation, is constantly marketing your product, so there needs to be focus there as well, and at many companies that is not happening and it just made me pause and to think from a different perspective. I've never seen technical product documentation presented in that quote, quote cool manner, so it really caught my eye, yeah.

Daniel: 5:15

Well, we might get to some of that in the conversation today about about some ways to do that visually, and but I do think, like you said, just practically speaking, there is a lot of back and forth. So good marketing content is based on the realities of what the product is and can do and you need to hear from the people who are really close to the product to make sure it's grounded in reality and it's clear and honest. So like there should be sharing of just the details and even some of the content. We really try to emulate that at TechSement. I hope anyone who's been around our content feels that way, both marketing and sort of post sale content. But we're all about let's just genuinely help you figure out how to be useful or be successful with the product and with what you're trying to accomplish.

Zohra: 5:54

Absolutely so. I think this conversation is going to be about enabling content creation across the board, which I'm really so excited about, because we're always looking for better ways to improve user experience. But you mentioned about being a marketing writer. What brought you over to the tech com side of things?

Daniel: 6:12

Yeah, so I ended up in product through an internal startup that we had at TechSement actually, and that was my first chance. So that was super fun because it was one of these, you know, it was kind of during those years where every company was doing like some of their own little startups, you know, and we were all reading Eric Reis and the Lean startup, and so I joined that team. It was a very small agile team with a few developers. I was sort of the customer discovery guy and the marketing blog post writer, all of those things, and so it was just really fun for me to have that. I had worked with a lot of customers more reactively, answering their questions, helping them along when they were stuck, and then, of course, feeding that back you know, the insights back to the product team.

Daniel: 6:56

But this was a chance to be like in at the ground level and be part of that. Like, what are the customer pain points? What are the problems? How should we prioritize them in the development of this new startup product that we were working on? And then how do we talk about that value that we're delivering to the customer and support them? So that was it sort of gave me a taste of the wine, so to speak. And then there was an opportunity to work with the Snagit team and I was like, hey, this, I think this would be what I would enjoy doing. So, yeah, it's just been a fun learning curve.

Zohra: 7:26

Awesome. Let's jump right into this. My question is you know you mentioned reactively, and to some extent that is the experience for having been a technical communicator, where we try to be proactive but then, depending on how teams are set up in a company, the information, the way information flows through, we are unable to anticipate what pinpoints the customer could end up in, because, although we believe we are close to our audience, that's not truly the case. In my current role, I do have the opportunity to sit in on discovery calls and work with product management very, very closely, so interaction with the business side, but I have been at companies where there has been that lack of opportunity, if you will.

Zohra: 8:09

When you said reactively, it really made me pause and said, yeah, that has kind of sometimes been the case, but we are moving away from the reactive to the more proactive with the way content is being created today, the way we are embedded and the way we are working in an agile manner, all cool things. But all said and done , we are still, I think, the underdogs, I think that's the term. We are still trying to figure out how to improve the user experience, and that brings in the visuals, and I think we are going to. Just I would like to jump right into that and kind of pick your brains on. What are your thoughts?

Daniel: 8:44

Yeah, I mean, I empathize with that. Actually, again, marketers and tech com folks often feel like they're the end of the train when it comes to product development, and the pace of product development has picked way up and our products we're still desktop products that are installed, so we're not releasing new updates every two weeks like a lot of cloud products are. But we've certainly changed. When I first started on Snagit, we were releasing updates to Snagit about every major versions about every 26 months, and now we do it about every 12 months, you know, for a major version plus. Then we're actually iterating in between and a lot of people feel that.

Daniel: 9:21

So yeah, so I think there it puts a lot of pressure on teams to say, if I'm going to have my documentation and my guides be visual, how do I actually do that? How do I keep up with the pace of change of the product and not just kill ourselves trying to always update everything and maintain it? So I think it really does put a lot of pressure and I've had people say to me my boss or boss's boss said why don't we just remove all the screenshots? Why don't we just remove all the visuals and just have block of text? It's so much easier and cheaper to update.

Zohra: 9:54

That's exactly been my experience too, where we have been encouraged to remove visuals. I want to kind of dive a little deeper into that From my perspective. Maintaining content, as you said, the speed at which we create content and release is literally. For enterprise content, the cadence is almost every two weeks. In fact, just in the last two weeks I have released three big features and if I had to maintain the visual content for it, it would.

Zohra: 10:23

I think my task would probably be monumental. I would not be able to keep pace with the sprint. Some of the challenges are if I want to stay current in a sprint with the developers, then adding visual content just adds another layer of complexity. We also have context-sensitive help where the user is in the UI, and also we are creating a lot more UI content that is residing within the user interface. For all these reasons, I feel like we have kind of moved away from adding that visual element or visual detail to content, but all said and done, we are still creating long-form content, and I do believe I'm on the fence. Do we add visual content or not? What are your thoughts?

Daniel: 11:07

Yeah, so I think that there has been a great and growing adoption of sort of those in-product helps.

Zohra: 11:15

Right In-product. That's right yeah.

Daniel: 11:17

And I think that's been a good development. You can go way back to the doc file that used to ship with inside of an installed software, so it's not fully new, but I think there's new mechanisms and better ways to integrate that, and I think that's absolutely helpful for in the moment when someone's trying to solve something and I just did that this last week with Google Analytics. I was using some part of this app that I hadn't really used before and I was like, oh, I'm going to click the little help bubble and right there in line was some basic what is this? What is this report? How do I understand what it is? Which is great in the moment, just in time. But I think it doesn't negate the.

Daniel: 11:55

I'm approaching Google Analytics for the first time, or I'm coming back to it, or whatever. The product is Right and I need to sit down and sort of understand what is the mental model. I need to learn about what's there. So I think there's a learning piece that's not going to be replaced by those in-product coachmarks and helps. And then the other thing we were talking about earlier was people exploring a product before they use it. How are they going to find out how the product actually works, if the only way to find that out is to start using the product and make that commitment, and that's more than what a lot of people are going to start with. So I think there's going to always be a good place for content that is outside of the product, and then you're back to that same challenge, right?

Daniel: 12:39

Yes, it's cheaper and easier to maintain without visuals, but all of the pressure from the consumer and the customer is we want that, we want to learn our preferences to have these visuals. There's a lot of signal of that and I would say even one of them is ask all of your friends when they get stuck on a project, how do they figure it out? This happened to me again, just like yesterday, and there was something that I was trying to figure out and I got stymied and my son came back to me later and he said oh, I found a YouTube video and it showed exactly how to do it. You type in the search engine, how do I do this? And then you watch the first video that shows you literally how to do the thing you're trying to do. So I think that's a lot of people's first inclination, and we've surveyed our customers and that's often their first inclination. I want to watch a video that shows me how to do it.

Zohra: 13:26

Oh yeah, absolutely, I think. I mean I ran into a similar issue with my Garmin watch and the model that I have is pretty old and it's not connecting with my phone, and I'm trying to figure out and I was looking for a visual to be told, although I'm the one whose profession is to create content and I'm trying not to add visuals because it's easy to maintain. However, there are areas, there are genres that do require visuals, and you did mention content that is outside of the product. For example, now I have used Snagit. I used Snag it day in, day out and there have been some features that have been added, some enhancements that really have simplified the way I create my visuals. How about we talk about that? I want to kind of pivot and talk about yeah, there are challenges and there are, but I think we need to, as professionals, we need to kind of sit back and think what is it that is going to improve user experience? And there is a need for visuals, absolutely.

Daniel: 14:26

Yeah, we've actually published some research on this because, sadly, a lot of the research that we could find was out of date and if you go back into academic research you'll actually find people at the advent of the internet and the advent of software publishing about documentation, best practices and how much do visuals help, but there hadn't been much recently. So a few years ago we did a study and we can link to it in the show notes. Where we actually did it was like a three-parter. So the first part was about preference and it was asking a fairly large group of people in the workplace how do you prefer to receive information? And video was preferred by around half of folks.

Daniel: 15:04

And then the next one was actually taking a smaller group of people into a lab setting and having them do some tasks. And then the researcher was, you know, it was more of a scientific study and they were watching their task performance and recall and things like that, and they found that people could do tasks about 7% faster with the visuals. And then fully two thirds of them were actually able to complete the tasks better when the instructions were either marked up screenshots with the text or videos, versus just text alone. So there was a marked improvement in ability to actually perform the task. So I think it's suggestive right that this matters. It matters to people using your product. You want them to be successful faster. And then think about the recall piece. A lot of us use products intermittently. When you come back and you use the product after some time away, you need to remember and you don't want to be like a zero beginner user again.

Daniel: 15:58

You know that's just really frustrating. So all of that is, I think, more evidence for why visuals do are important, and it's worth going to your boss and saying I know it's going to take a little more time and we might need to have some different tooling available, but it's worth maintaining this, at least in some of our content.

Zohra: 16:15

I think you make an excellent case for why to include the visuals and I will definitely remember to include that the research study in my show notes. Absolutely, and I think we all are, to a large extent, visual learners. I don't want to make a blanket statement, but I think the most people that I interact with, especially when we are remote, it's hard to just explain stuff, so having a visual component to that communication absolutely enhances the overall experience, the learning experience. Now, with all these challenges, you've made a point. We need to go. We need to go and make a, I guess, a case for adding visuals. Do you have any tips for professionals like us? Because one we are low on budget most of the times and low on time. Given those constraints, what would you suggest? How do we make a case for ourselves using the study that you've conducted?

Daniel: 17:10

Yeah, so I think you know we can take them one at a time in terms of images versus videos. I think there are some techniques that people can use, one that we've spent a lot of time talking with technical communicators and even building capabilities into Snagit, into our product. It's called simplified user interface or SUI, and it's kind of an effect I'm sure you've seen in content. It originated in marketing content, actually, but it kind of came over to the technical side, which is to abstract out a lot of the busy detail using kind of light colored blocks. That's a really simplified way of describing it.

Daniel: 17:48

Maybe we could show some examples too in the show notes, because it is visual, but it's basically covering up parts of the interface that the person doesn't need to see, because those are surfaces that are going to go out of date and then necessitate more change, right? So if you kind of obscure, abstract some of that detail, then it protects you from having to update it as often, and then what you leave visible is either no text or much less text, and I've seen both. It was interesting a few years ago, Microsoft invested heavily in this approach and you saw a whole bunch of tips for edge browser that were completely devoid of text. They managed to just like get rid of all of it, and it was just these really suggestive sort of shapes of the interface and little animations that would go through. That were lightweight tips, so this wasn't heavy documentation.

Zohra: 18:39

Right, right.

Daniel: 18:40

But I was like bold move and what you can imagine is well, one, they're really easy to maintain and two, they're also they require zero localization. We haven't talked about that yet but for some teams localization is a big, big cost when you think about visuals. So they were able to just sidestep all of that with this. That was an extreme and these teams they iterate. So probably if you went to the edge tips right now they might be different. But yeah, I think trying that kind of simplified approach.

Daniel: 19:08

Another real practical tip is just cropping down. So you know, and anyone who's spent time kind of really studying big brands documentation, you'll see this right, they don't put the full, big, huge screenshot. They crop down to kind of the part that you really need and that can help. Sometimes you'll hear customers say well, I had trouble knowing the context. So there's a good way to sort of step people through that. Maybe an earlier screenshot is more zoomed out and then you can. You know, the subsequent screenshots can be a little more cropped in and just have less, less part visible. That's going to go out of date.

Zohra: 19:40

No, actually I really did not think about localization at all as you were giving us these different tips and, unlike for enterprise products that are being localized, that would be a big, big saver for sure. As part of the study. I'm just curious was there a certain demographic that was part of the research in terms of I'm just curious, what about a demographic that is 40 plus, for example? Like abstracting all this information out. So I'll give you a case in point.

Zohra: 20:09

I was working at this company before I came to Blackboard, where I used Snagit to simplify and we had we did not create developer content, but the developers consumed the content that technical communicators created because they would be assigned to different features. They would come back and they would forget. So they would treat the product documentation as a starting point. Sometimes, or when a new engineer was onboarded, they would use product documentation. What I interestingly noticed now this is very anecdotal, but what I noticed was, with these simplified visuals, the some of the more, I guess, the more experienced developers were lost Because they were looking at the UI and they were looking at the visual and they were not able to kind of relate to it match them.

Zohra: 21:00

I have you, as the study revealed any such thing to you? I'm just curious.

Daniel: 21:05

I'm looking at the methodology section right now. The part on preference was 4500 office workers. So I think they I don't know if we were specific about age they were the dispersed geographically. So we had Australia, Canada, the doc region, France, UK and US. The scientific panel where we brought people into the lab was about 125 people.

Daniel: 21:27

Again, I don't know age range, I don't see that in the study about demographics so, but I've heard that anecdotally from folks too, or just hey, our customers, given who they are and how they use the product like this doesn't work for us. So my advice is is test it out. I think a really nice place to test stuff like this is in release notes, in sort of the top level. Like you know, some often there's sort of this level of like getting started. That's a little more introductory and it's less like I'm weighing the weeds and now I'm trying to like find this one really specific thing, reference doc. So those would be my tips on where to start and then, if you have a good feedback mechanism, you'll learn. You know, hopefully from from customers how well it's received.

Zohra: 22:10

Yeah, that's definitely what you're going to be doing on now. We talked about the different. You give us tips right on how to think about simplifying and using visuals. Are there any specific genres? I think you did mention using it in the read me outside of the product, any other suggestions or examples that you can give to our audience?

Daniel: 22:33

Yeah, so you mentioned in-product, so there's another way to combine these things. It's really interesting. We didn't talk about video necessarily, yet We've had some users do this and we do this in some of our own content, if you will. That's inside the product is. If you hover, for example, over any of the tools in the toolbar in Snagit, there are these little tips that come up. They're a rich animation. We call them, I think, in rich tool tips.

Daniel: 22:56

Those are their simplified little loops, little animations that go through and show you even though you are in the UI. So on one end you could say, well, why have that? On the other hand, our testing showed that it was still helpful for people to have that visual anchor of what happens when I click this. It previews that. So I think that's one area people could consider those animations. So maybe it's in a help article. Sometimes you have almost a little animated GIF that's showing like when you click this, this is what happens. Or when you interact with this, it slides open and then you interact with that. There's these little things that are hard to explain in text, for sure. I mean how awkward was what I just said. So, yeah, being able to see that with a little looping animation. I think those are great places to start trying this simplified user interface or Sui effect.

Zohra: 23:48

I love those. I love that. Yes, I haven't tried the animated GIFs, but I will tell you this remote environment sometimes it's hard to communicate what you're trying to, or even educating somebody. One of the writers that I was working with was having a really hard time, and I was so thrilled to see the recording option, the video option in Snagit Quick and easy. I loved it and I have used it many, many times over too, just internally, not just when I am creating product documentation that is end user facing, but even internally, just as a day-to-day tool. I feel like it has enabled me in so many ways.

Daniel: 24:29

I mentioned video and my tips around video. I think just high level is thinking about where you can have the biggest impact. Of course, not every function maybe you want to document as video, but thinking about the happy paths through the product and what are the things that you just most need people to really be able to be successful with and use video to illustrate those and help people show the whole workflow. I love with video as well that you can anchor it a little bit at the beginning with what is the value of this workflow we talked about right at the beginning. You can get a little bit of that marketing or value prop in there and convey that just very naturally when you start this workflow. It's really important because blah, blah, blah and this is going to help your business in this way, and then you show it.

Daniel: 25:18

I think that there are great opportunities for some of those high level things. Then the other tip I would say about maintenance of those videos is I mean, I'll love on Camtasia for a minute, but use a product that doesn't make it crazy difficult to update. One of the things that we try to just do is make it really simple to record the screen If you don't go overboard with production on those videos keep them pretty simple and straightforward.

Daniel: 25:45

Have some nice intro, some nice outro, but mostly screen content in the middle. It doesn't have to be mind-blowing, but it will be helpful and much easier to maintain. We've even got folks that just use Snagit, which it's not an LE non-linear editor. It doesn't have multi-track, you can't add music and all that, but it's simple and straightforward. At making a video, some teams are like actually our customers really love the authenticity of just I'm talking to you while you're watching me. Do click through these things on the screen. I think it's important in that case not to make it long rambling. You maybe script it out a little bit or have an idea so that you can move through the workflow very concisely. But I think that it doesn't have to be high production to have a lot of value for your users.

Zohra: 26:37

I'm so grateful to you for bringing up those tips the happy path, anchoring your content and then not going overboard with production. I think that's something that I have personally struggled with. I haven't created video content in my career and that's been one of the main reasons, because I feel like when I create video content, it has to be stellar. The benchmark is just a very high bar.

Zohra: 26:59

I'm setting for myself I think, with you giving me that permission, quote unquote. That's also another reason why I think I have hesitated to go visual with my podcast, but I would like to change that. What I would like to do for this show, if you don't mind, is for you to share some clips about the feature that we've talked about, so that at least I can point my audience to those features that are available.

Daniel: 27:23

Yeah, yeah, in your product.

Zohra: 27:25

I can look it up, but I want to make it easy for them.

Daniel: 27:27

Yeah, for sure. I think we have a set of tools. We have a simplified tool that's all about creating this simplified user interface effect. Again, not to toot our own horn, but there's no other product that has that. It was really built with and for folks that are in technical communication roles and explicitly built on their feedback and input on how to make this tool useful for everyday tech com content.

Zohra: 27:58

Awesome. We've touched upon so many interesting things. Now my season is all about AI artificial intelligence and I'm curious to know what does Snagit and your products have to offer that can enable me to be more productive, to be more efficient?

Daniel: 28:16

Yeah for sure. So it's been fascinating to watch the rocket that has been AI this year. It's just been something that I think all of us had half an eye on before 2023, but it's just been like, ok, what's going to be next? In the first part of the year especially, one of the things that I think gets that happens in the midst of the big hype cycle is one element of this takes all the air out of the room Right now. It's large language models and chat GPT and that style of AI, and so I have less to say about that, though I think it's very interesting to see some tech com folks experiment with either running content through to try to condense it, or, if you're going to create a video, start with, maybe, your outline or ask chat GPT to give you an outline and then start from there. So I think there are some really interesting things that people are playing with and, honestly, around large language models and even generative AI. I would say mostly what I see is it's a playground, and that's fantastic. It's one of the fun things about being in tech, right, is that we're all trying to figure out how is this going to be useful to our business. So, techsmith. We've actually done some investment in AI previously, before it was large language models.

Daniel: 29:32

So there are features. We've talked about a few of them already. But there are features in. Let's talk about Snagit for a minute, that simplify feature.

Daniel: 29:39

We actually use what's called computer vision under the hood and that has to do with it's basically AI that was trained on a lot of images in order to find edges and find objects within images.

Daniel: 29:52

It's not the same as chat GPT, but it is AI and what that does is allows us to have a basic feature that is, flip the switch on this simplify tool and it reads your image and then does its best to find all the objects, to simplify and put a little object, a little shape, over top of them all and line them up. Now it's not perfect. It's sort of like the way chat GPT takes away the blank page problem and it gives you a good start. Similarly, when you're using the simplify tool, you flip that switch and you're like, wow, I might be 60%, 70%, 80% of the way to what I need, and so I think that's just. It's a big help because the machine doing a bunch of that tedious stuff not to pick on Adobe, but the alternative for creating this effect is Illustrator, and you're manually lining up all of these shapes, you know, and creating all these shapes, so we wanted to automate a lot of that.

Zohra: 30:47

Oh, that sounds really interesting, and this is available with the latest version of Snagit.

Daniel: 30:52

Yeah, it's been in Snagit for a little bit so, but yes, it's also in the latest version. When we did that work for the Simplify tool, it was part of a broader set of innovation that we were doing. The organizing idea there was it's been way too many years that a screenshot was flat and static and forever. And we're like what if we blew up that concept? I had people talk to me about how when they're creating their docs, they're like sometimes I'm taking whole sections of my UI in my screenshot and trying to like push things around to just tighten it up a little bit or take out wasted space or remove some clutter. So we actually have another set of features in there. One is called Smart Move and it allows you to kind of it identifies again all the objects so you can move things around. There's one called Autofill, where you can select things and hit delete and it just autofills the surrounding background. I mean that sounds trivial but oh my gosh, whenever you know that's not trivial.

Zohra: 31:51

I know how that would.

Daniel: 31:52

You don't want to create a hole in your screenshot, right? Yes, yes, so this fills the hole with with the surrounding stuff. So it makes it really nice to just move, you know, manipulate your screenshot. And there's another one that goes as far as editing text. So you'd say, well, the text in my screenshot is forever, I can't edit it. You can actually select it and hit edit text and it does multiple operations in the background. It actually identifies the text with OCR, optical character recognition, right and then it finds the surrounding background. It deletes the text, fills it with the surrounding background and then puts a text box on top with your text in it. That's now editable.

Daniel: 32:29

It's very neat, and it tries to match the font, at least get the font family. Usually, if you're a Techcom pro, you already know what font is your official font, so you might adjust it to that. But yeah, so there's just stuff like this that is big time saving and that's since Nugget. We've recently been talking about all of this as screen intelligence. It's a portmanteau, I guess that got trademarked, but it's sort of this screen-based intelligence, because that's our bread and butter, right? That's what Techs with is all about, is screen-based content, if you want me to go on and talk about Camtasia and Audiate. I'm happy to.

Zohra: 33:03

Yeah, please, absolutely go for it. I think the goal here is to really share what these products can do as assistive tools in Audiate today. So I'm very curious. I'm very curious to know.

Daniel: 33:15

Yeah, it's all about speeding up those workflows. So, with Camtasia, one of the latest things that we introduced there and it's tough because now it's in Zoom, it's everywhere, but it's background removal, so that can be a problem where some people it's like I want to leave my background in because that's very authentic, but other people are like I would like to replace it with something that's stock photo or whatever, and so we've had a green screen type capability in Camtasia for a long time, but recently we've been using AI to kind of more intelligently map around the person and cut them out and be able to replace the background. Then the other term that I mentioned it might not be familiar to your users or to your listeners is Audiate. I guess we just love these kind of names as for products, camtasia and Audiate just jamming a couple words together. So Audiate is it basically has a metaphor of imagine if you could edit video the way you edit text, and so I actually use that.

Daniel: 34:14

Today I'm working on a video that's going to be for our all hands meeting on Monday, and I fed the video that I recorded in Snagit actually into Audiate.

Daniel: 34:24

It cleaned up my audio using AI type tools and then I can go in there and edit word by word, because it transcribes it again using AI, and then I can get rid of my ums, I can tighten up the spaces.

Daniel: 34:38

There's even some phrases where I like was correcting what I said on the fly and I can take out the duplicative content and eventually, kind of the direction we're headed with this stuff is look, if I'm editing the text to edit the underlying video, what if I type some text and then you could generate my voice to fill in or change or add something right, and so being able to train this tool to have my specific voice in it so that I can create content? And, of course, as you go down that path, you think about well, now, what if you have a more generic voice and then a whole team of people can create that content and you're not tied to me my microphone, my recording environment, what if I leave the company? What are you going to do? You know you don't have my voice anymore. So if you find a really nice, like easy on the ears and they're getting better all the time right, Right.

Daniel: 35:30

Generated voice, then that solves a bunch of problems and we could talk about localization. Now you just write the script. The screen content can be anyone can record the screen content, but you can have the generative voice, create the voice over.

Zohra: 35:45

Of everything that you've said, I'm the most excited about audio and I'll tell you why. Because with podcasting there is a post-production of cost, even though it's just audio. And I have run my audio throughAudieate, my video through audio, to see how I can edit and just remove clips and what is it? Stitch is an option, I believe, but I had no idea that I could actually transcribe and have, and I think these are probably all the AI enhancements that have been probably rolled out. But I'm really, really excited and I think, for companies that may be creating content, because a lot of them are creating podcasts, content in different forms, not just podcasts but different forms and if you had to think about cost and if the technology can drive down cost and enable us to improve that user experience that's what we kind of aim for these are all some great, I think, a move in that direction, which is really awesome. And, as I said, creating my podcast and if I can cut down my cost because I do this as a passion, this is awesome for me.

Daniel: 36:51

I think about. It's really easy to illustrate the value of that with just simple examples, like if you ever worked on a video and you had it out for some feedback from your stakeholders, you get that late breaking suggestion and you're like, are you kidding me? You know what would take me to go back and just change those four words. Yeah, it's a monumental effort to set it all back up and record again and insert that in. But when you're talking about kind of generating that from the script, you change the script and it regenerates the voice. And I'm one that's like I want to be cautious and think about like the dark side and the downsides of all these technologies. I just think for tutorial training, technical content, like it's one of the easiest justifications for like it's not big creative projects. Usually it's not about the personality, the person speaking. You know, sometimes it is, but often it's not. You kind of actually want that a little bit in the background.

Daniel: 37:42

So, and efficiency matters so much so like I think going to blow the doors off of being able to create those videos that we're talking about much more deeply and maintain them and localize them. You know, I think it's made a game changer.

Zohra: 37:57

Yeah, I think as recent as last week I was talking to somebody from my support team and they were the training department and they wanted to create a video and they wanted to keep the cost low and they were asking us about how to get something quickly out the door without making some big changes. And I think this is that foot in the door for us.

Daniel: 38:18

Yeah, yeah, I mean I think that you know, if you're not already using AI assisted kind of generative stuff, at least go with the keep it simple. That was the advice I was giving earlier. You know, keep it simple and don't overcook it, but start exploring. You know what you can do with generative tools, because I think that will be the way of the future.

Zohra: 38:38

Oh, absolutely, and I think we shouldn't be shying away from that. The more we try, the more we learn, and I think it gives at least for me. It's given me an edge in small ways and I've definitely used it for ideation, like you said, that blank paper in front of you. You know I don't want to have that writer's block and it has helped me push forward.

Daniel: 38:58

Yeah, that's awesome. It's a fun time to be, you know, in tech right Like just getting to play with some of this stuff. It's crazy.

Zohra: 39:05

It's insane. I mean, it's just amazing what you can do. It's like technology at your fingertips you have power at your fingertips. Now I think it's amazing. Definitely, Daniel. We have covered a pretty good amount of, I think, ground here. We've touched upon challenges where we can incorporate some of these tools and techniques, in fact, and how to strategize better and how to save costs at the end of the day, while trying to improve user experience, which is all awesome. Is there anything that you would like to add that I may have not asked or missed?

Daniel: 39:37

I would just if I'm kind of recapping some of the themes here. You know it does start with the user. It starts with their preference for how they want to learn your product and get help using your product. So getting in tune with their preferences and even asking them. I found it was really helpful when we did some surveys to ask how do you like to learn about and be supported with products at work, and it was very insightful.

Daniel: 40:03

One of the things that was really clear from that is it's not univocal, right, it's not homogenous. I mean, some people were like I love getting emails with tips and other people are like please don't send me emails with tips and it's going to be the same with you know, visuals. There are some people that are going to say I only read the text, but I think there's just a growing urgency to deal with having some way of satisfying the demand for video and more kind of rich visual forms, because I think the next generation just think about love it or hate it the amount of time people spend on TikTok. That is just training you to kind of pull in information in very visual formats, and so we got to satisfy that demand.

Zohra: 40:44

Absolutely, and I think, with everything that you shared in how simplified the process can be if you think about it, if you think it through, it's not. It doesn't have to be hard, and I think that could possibly pivot us in that direction. I think so far it's been like oh my God, it's just putting too much of responsibility on my plate and I don't want to do it. It doesn't sound anymore, as onerous as it may have been, so I think it definitely simplifies the process overall.

Daniel: 41:11

Yeah, yeah, I think, embracing that trend, that there is sort of a trend towards simpler, less. I mean, of course there's still lots of high production stuff, but when you look at TikTok or you look at you know a lot of these platforms the production value is more about the authenticity, the connection it just, it done, just connects with another human. And so I think, embrace that, lean into that with your brand as much as you are allowed to with the brand stewards, but it can really relieve some of that pressure. And then the other thing to remember is all of us have figured out how to be on video with the pandemic.

Zohra: 41:43

Oh yeah, that definitely is true.

Daniel: 41:46

You know, we all spent some time learning how to talk to each other over Zoom, and it's really not that different to make a video for even a coworker or for your customers.

Zohra: 41:54

Awesome, great tips. Daniel, I've had an amazing time just chatting with you and learning so much.

Daniel: 42:01

I hope you had a great time too. Yeah, no, it was a privilege. It was really fun to talk with you. Thanks for making it easy and fun conversation. I hope other folks get a lot out of it. If you want to find me on LinkedIn, I always love to accept the invites and connect with people there and maybe all see folks at a conference sometime.

Zohra: 42:19

I hope to run into a conference where you are attending, hopefully sometime soon, but definitely please pass on those links to me about the study and anything else that you think may be relevant to my audience to add to the show notes, and I'll be happy to add it.

Daniel: 42:33

Thanks so much.

Zohra: 42:34

Thanks so much, Daniel. Appreciate it. Subscribe to the podcast on your favorite app, such as Google, apple or Spotify, for the latest on my show, follow me on LinkedIn or visit me at www. insidetechcomm. show. Catch you on another episode.