Correlating the things

I am sorry for not updating this space for quite some time. I was really busy with little personal stuffs, frequent weekend travels, blah blahs. I really ask sorry to those thousands of this blog readers (just kidding).

I really cherish those moments when I watch television ads with my son (18 months old), who likes ads than cartoons. I really surprise on his skills the way he correlates real things with those comes on television. One fine day, I showed a bottle of Dettol hand washer kept near the wash basin when the same product ad appeared on the virtual screen. After a day, same ad came on the screen (of course they sponsor a lot of programs in different channels). He quickly pulled my hands and showed the same bottle kept aside. I was on a pleasant  surprise. He is able to recognize that product colour, shape and that ad sound of course.

Now as a Technical Writer, I am correlating this incident (anecdote) with the user experience. Rather than writing hundred pages user manual, it’s really a good idea to present them with video tutorials, and captivate demos to explore a particular feature of a product. The User will grasp the new things easily by these kinds of visuals than reading hundreds of pages. Of course, it’s human brain’s tendency to correlate things visually than reading or learning by themselves.

New Features in Captivate 4

As I mentioned in my earlier post on Captivate, I always enjoy using Captivate and admire its user-friendly features. Adobe has released Captivate 4 recently.

Here is the list of my favourite features:

• Panning While Recording
• Widgets
• Project and Design Templates
• Table of Contents
• Single or Multiple SWF Output
• Text-to-speech Captions
• Captivate Reviewer
• Photoshop Layer Support

To read a detailed review on Captivate 4, read Scott DeLoach’s article in http://writerua.com.

The most bothering drawback is Captivate 4 help system is not context-sensitive.

Things to do before using the Captivate

 I always rely on Adobe Captivate (before it was Macromedia Captivate) for preparing training materials, tutorials and demos. It is simple to handle as well as effective in covering your clients training needs. Not only you can customize the call-outs and standard messages, but also it gives a real effect of exploring your product/application.

There are few pre-requisites before you start on with captivate.

Close your Outlook and Instant messenger services without any second thought. Whenever you get a new email, outlook will show a pop-pop alert. Captivate will capture those pop-ups also along with your regular actions in the application. So as a result, your client will come to know that your mailbox has exceeded its limit through your training demo.

Captivate captures your Outlook pop-ups

Never open or explore any applications, folders when you are capturing with the Captivate. Reason is same as mentioned above. Otherwise be ready to redo your capture.  🙂