Twine Product Training Videos
Video Tutorials
Problem
Twine is an open-source tool which can be used to develop branching stories. While it is offered for free, for this project I imagined what their customer education products would look like if they were a Software as a Service (SaaS) company. The problem would be how to instruct their users how to use their products. The Twine audience ranges from tech-savvy web developers to writers just wanting a platform to publish. This spectrum of skills could pose a challenge.
Solution
The solution is a series of product training videos that are available on Twine’s YouTube channel. One of the best ways to learn a new skill is to see it modeled, so these tutorials could be used as support as users follow along and try to build their own stories. The goal is to empower the public to use Twine’s products independently.
Tools Used
Camtasia
Adobe Illustrator
Twine
Design & Development
Considerations when designing and developing these videos were cognitive load and branding. I wanted to keep each tutorial under 5 minutes to maximize attention, and narrowed the focus of each video to a single skill. For visual design I used the style from Twine’s homepage as an influence, relying on their fonts and colors.
The videos were developed in Camtasia, with some custom illustrations from Adobe Stock being edited in Adobe Illustrator. I sourced music from 123RF, looking for something with an upbeat synth-pop feel as it mimics the focused mindset of playing a video game. I did go back and forth between including a floating picture-in-picture of me speaking via a webcam, but ultimately decided that because the Twine platform can be complex, I didn’t want any other distractions on the screen. I used the built in audio effects to edit the sound, removing background noise and adding mouse clicks.
Using YouTube Studio, I edited the captions for each video to make them more accessible. Setting the language to English and manually correcting the automatically generated captions ensures a higher level of accuracy.
Evaluation
These product training videos could be evaluated by harnessing data: the baseline numbers I would want to establish would be number of customers, length of subscriptions, and the number of questions coming into the customer education team. Once the videos go live, the next measurement would be views on YouTube. This should result in customers needing less support, and maintaining subscriptions for longer periods of time. The videos would also show that there is not a steep learning curve for Twine, therefore, new customers would subscribe. Overall, these product training videos will result in more satisfied customers and greater profits.