Pros and Cons of Using Videos in your Knowledge Base
I’ve been working with a client who is aiming to encourage its experts to create a good amount of videos for their knowledge base–and it seems to be working, producing solid content in decent amounts.
This got me thinking about the pros and cons of creating videos for a knowledge base, with the hope of encouraging more experiments in that direction. I certainly don’t want to discourage traditional documents, but videos are a useful additions, and much less trouble than you would think.
Pros
- User preference. Some users really love consuming video content and will systematically ignore standard documents in favor of videos. The proportion of video-first users depends on your user base, but it’s not zero!
- Creator preference. Many would-be authors suffer from English-essay phobia and will devise elaborate ruses to avoid writing even a short document–but they are comfortable gabbing, especially if they can use a screen-plus-voiceover format and not show their faces. Harness their knowledge with a video instead of a document.
- Existing content. Recording a webinar or a chalk talk can yield a good knowledge base asset, especially if you can perform light editing.
- Topic fit. Product demos, procedures, how-tos, setups are all good candidates for videos that match the actual experience better than a static document.
- Automatic transcripts. AI products can produce a transcript automatically and pretty accurately from a video. So you get both a document and a video, suitable for various learning preferences.
Cons
- Creator dislike. In the pro section I mentioned that some creators prefer creating videos, but there are also some who hate videos. Get them to create documents, instead.
- Full-production cost. Slick, heavily-produced videos are certainly resource intensive but I think you can get adequate quality for a knowledge base asset by using basic recording tools (maybe an external mic?), talent (regular support engineers), format (screen plus voiceover) and process (maybe a quick rehearsal?).
- Heavier creation/validation lift. Even with a basic setup, creating and uploading a video requires a few more steps and clicks from the creator as opposed to text–and ditto for the person validating the video.
- Harder updates. Editing text is easy; editing a video is not, or at least not yet. Keep videos brief so re-shoots are as painless as possible–and use the transcripts to facilitate them.
Bottom line: it’s worth experimenting with videos. Get a few enthusiasts to record meaningful, short examples to demonstrate how useful they can be and challenge other support engineers to follow suit.
Do you use videos in your knowledge base? What additional arguments can you share on either side?
