I have been making sites for quite sometime now, but have one I think could be pretty useful. One of the challenges I am facing however is taking a very difficult topic and "dumbing" it down for the masses. I am a huge fan of built-in context help and video explanations as they seem to allow you to connect more. So my questions is this, is it better to have a help menu with some supplementary text, or a video someone could watch?
This took some effort, but one site I worked on a few years ago used neither technique (well, it <i>did</i> have context-sensitive help, but that's not "showing how"). For each help topic and FAQ, I created in-page, automated demonstrations with Javascript. Essentially, a big green "arrow" pointer and pre-recorded audio with on-screen captions showing exactly how to do something, while actually doing it on the site.<p>So the benefit of "showing" how to do something without the bandwidth required for video, far more engaging than straight text ("click here, type something, tap that, etc."), and slightly interactive (the user could, depending on what was being demonstrated, participate in the scripted events - imagine being shown how to enter keywords in a CMS).<p>I keep wondering if I should commercialize that sort of thing for other sites, actually...
Ideally, both.<p>I personally prefer to start by glancing at text. If it seems interesting I'll watch the video. If I want to know more, I'll read the text carefully and click the links.