ReadWriteWeb

Your startup can have developed the most amazing application ever, but if your customers can't figure out how to use it, then it's bound to be a flop. The startup IORAD hopes to address what it calls "the most painful part of deploying applications - user training" with a tool that makes creating a tutorial incredibly simple.

A screencast is a quick way to indroduce a product or feature and to show customers how something works. Screencasts are a popular online instructional tool, allowing you to explain things in a way many users will find preferable to dense text and more helpful than screenshots alone.

There are a number of tools available that make screencasting fairly simple, but here are some tips to help you along the way:

One of my favorite blogs to peruse now and then for amazing advice on web design is Webdesigner Depot which produces excellent in depth guides for various design related issues. Monday they produced an excellent in depth post that provides a step-by-step breakdown of best practices for creating a screen-cast for a Web page, a feature many startups like to include on their homepage to familiarize new visitors with their product.

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Remember what it was like to capture video off a computer screen before desktop recording software came along?

You'd mount a big, expensive camera on a tripod, point it at the screen and, unless you had tweaked a bunch of settings or loaded special software, you'd get black bars creeping up and down the screen because of a refresh rate mismatch. And once you solved that problem, you still needed to be well versed in editing tools, video-tape transfer and replication.