Maintaining a professional and up-to-date help section in a start-up company
August 31st, 2010 by Anita Filed Under Faculte
When I joined Faculte as an intern about a year ago, one of my very first assignments was going through the product and updating – and as it would turn out, practically recreating – all the product tutorials. A little bit further down the road I was also assigned putting all these tutorials in a separate help section, where our users could browse them easily.
I spent a lot of time on this extensive task – hard work, but as a very recent transplant in Silicon Valley I did enjoy it and earned a lot. Finally, a few weeks into the process, I saw light at the end of the tunnel. Our wiki page was up and running with several handfuls of tutorials. I was done! Or so i thought.
Around the same time I received the specs for our upcoming release – a couple of new, very cool features, several UI tweaks that would make the product that more intuitive, and a few wording changes across the platform to clarify the sections. They looked great! And yes, of course I realized with a sigh that ten of my tutorials needed to be redone, in addition to three new ones.
Sounds familiar? I am convinced I am not the only one with this experience – but I know I do have an unfair advantage. The platform I am creating tutorials about and in has features that makes the updating process as easy as humanly possible.
Modify on-the-fly - sometimes, all it takes to update a tutorial is a small change. Switching out an image, correcting a typo, changing a link. Using Faculte, I can hit Edit, make the simple change, and re-publish. No long conversions or everlasting video uploads over making a minor change!
Content on a page-by-page basis - when I go to edit a tutorial about a specific part of a specific feature – I only need to worry about that part of the tutorial. No music needs to be timed again, no transitions will be messed up if my new content is longer than the old version – I simply edit the one or few pages that needs changes, and Publish it.
Save as a draft - when updating an existing tutorial because of a product release, the goal is of course that the moment the platform is out, the tutorials are switched out. Let’s for simplicity say you’re using YouTube to distribute the tutorials. (meaning you are not concerned about content confidentiality, you don’t mind giving YouTube full license to your content and you don’t mind unrelated or competitor ads in your content). You need to either re-upload the videos after deployment, or upload them in advance and switch our every single piece of embed code. Both can be done – but they are time consuming, and if you like us have a products that gets updated every three or fours weeks: it’s just not viable. Using Faculte, I can Edit the existing content whenever I want – and save the changes as a draft. The moment the new release is out, all I have to do is hit Publish, and the help section content is updated! It does not get a lot easier than that.
Sometimes I get tired and demotivated having to continuously update the help section material. Every time I think I am done, there is something new that needs updating. But you know what? Having full access to the best solution there is makes it easy, absolutely bearable and – when I can hit that publish button – satisfactory, and even fun!
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Improving the Producer
August 12th, 2010 by Anita Filed Under Faculte
The last few months we have put a lot of effort into improving the structure around Broadcasts; we have introduced Series, Channels, Q&A feature, new Payment flow and Collaboration settings - just to mention some of it.
So we figured it was about time to take a look at the core of our platform; the Broadcast Producer, where your content is created.
Our users will notice that there are a few button design changes; the Attachments button can now be found in your Preferences menu; the Wizard will now only be available upon creating a New Broadcast. All these are minor improvements, and we do believe you will find them simple and intuitive.
The largest change this time around will become easily apparent to you the next time you open the Producer to create or edit a Broadcast: Where the Producer used to cover a small part of the browser window, with a lot of other content and menus surrounding it, we have now decided to give you full concentration when editing. The Producer now covers the entire Browser, giving you more workspace and a clear focus. We hope you appreciate the improvement!
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Collaborate like never before
July 27th, 2010 by Anita Filed Under Customers, Faculte, New Features
Last night our Studio saw yet another release, and yet again we have new, exciting features for you!
The main change this time around is a new and improved version of our Collaboration feature. Up until now, Collaboration could be ON or OFF for an account. If Collaboration was ON, you could choose whether the default setting for a Broadcast was Everybody can edit, Everybody can copy or Nobody can do anything.
Then one Producer asked us: What if I want to create a Broadcast with one of the other Producers? I don’t want everybody to have access to my assets, but I want to have this person collaborate with me on the project. Can I do this without giving her my password?
Another asked: My Broadcast is in English; I want someone to translate it for me so I can reach a broader audience. But I only want to give my Translator access, not everybody in my account – and I don’t wish to provide her with my password either. Can I do this?
We started thinking about this. How about expanding our Collaboration feature so that:
- A Translator can join an account, be given collaboration access to the specific Broadcast that needs translation, and once translated, the access is removed again.
- A Marketing Manager can make an outline of the new Marketing content. He then invites their professional VoiceOver expert to join the account, turns Collaboration ON – and when the VoiceOver is created, turns Collaboration off
- The in-house design team is part of the account, but they are not interested in seeing all the Communication content being created. Every now and then, when a Broadcast is ready to be shared, they will be given access to it, can refine and decorate it, and once that is done, access is taken away and they do not have to worry about it anymore
… and of course, all of the above can be done without everybody in the account seeing, accessing, and having their Home tabs cluttered by a load of non-relevant Broadcasts.
Online Authoring Collaboration has had a big advantage over Desktop Authoring for quite a while now. Even Microsoft Office is taking their Authoring Tools online!
With our new and improved Collaboration Feature, we take yet another step forward and away from Desktop Editing. Gathering, Editing and Collaborating on your Multimedia Content online has never been easier with Faculte.
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Purchasing content has never been easier – neither has tracking your purchases!
June 30th, 2010 by Anita Filed Under Faculte
New Purchase Process
Usually we will focus on our own users, existing or potential, when we develop new and tweak old features. This time around however, the main change of our latest deployment is not for our customers – but for our customers’ customers!
We saw that when you found a Broadcast that you wanted to purchase, the process to do so was rather tedious. We decided that we wanted to make it easier for you – so we changed the process quite drastically.
For customers who have paid for Broadcasts before, we do believe you will, with this release, find a more stable and rapid payment process. For new customers, we hope you will find the payment process quite intuitive. If you have any feedback, do not hesitate to contact us directly!
Statistics
More and more of our users wish to monetize their online content – I think anyone can understand that! So in order for them to better track their viewers and customers, we have made quite a few updates to our Statistics feature. The major one is that we now distinguish between Regular Views, Previews, Purchases and viewers returning to view a Paid Broadcast again.
CSV support
We have also added a neat little change to our Contact List feature: You can now copy-paste comma or tab delimited lists of names and emails to easily import all your existing contacts into your Broadcast Studio!
We hope all of you – customers and customers’ customers – will be satisfied with the feature updates! As always, send us your feedback – it is appreciated!
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Any questions?
May 27th, 2010 by Anita Filed Under Faculte
Communication is one of the most interesting topics we know. There are thousands of theories, systems and philosophies, and yet when it comes down to it, even though theories are interesting, there are no definite answers. No matter how clear you are in delivering your message, no matter how fine-tuned and well tweaked your message are, there are always someone who will not understand. Communicating clearly with people in your own community, who speak the same language and have the same cultural background can be difficult enough – and in today’s online environment, none of these are prerequisite.
So when you do attempt to communicate a message online – be it an educational class, a product tutorial or a marketing message – no matter how thorough you are, there are going to be questions. Your viewers will want the ability to ask them – and you want to clarify and avoid misunderstandings by answering – so what do you do?
Provide your viewers with you email address? It will make it easy for them to contact you, and for you to respond. But by sharing your email with the world, sooner or later, you will start receiving spam email. And, as your viewer group grows, you will start receiving questions multiple times.
Create and participate in a discussion forum? It will avoid spam and duplicate questions (to a certain extent). But how do you prevent people who have not paid for a class to view the questions and answers? Either a lot of manual track-keeping, or an expensive user management system. And then there’s the problem of not having everything in the same place – if your viewer has to leave your content and enter a forum to ask a question, there is no guarantee that they will find their way back to your content – or the answer in the forum.
We have been pondering these questions for a while, and think we have come up with an awesome solution; our newest feature, simply called Questions & Answers.
When Q&A is enabled for a Broadcast, viewers can – as they are viewing – click Questions & Answers in the broadcast menu. Staying in the same window, they can review previously asked questions on the Q&A board and send the broadcast creator either a new question for the Q&A board or a personal message. The answers are sent by email and on the Q&A board – but without disclosing your email address.
As a Broadcast producer, you can easily manage your Q&A board from within your regular Faculte account. No more jumping back and forth between applications! (but of course we will notify you by email if you want us to)
our Q&A tutorial, and feel free to ask questions – yes, in our brand new Q&A feature!
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Searchable Channels – our latest innovation
April 27th, 2010 by Anita Filed Under Faculte, New Features
A Broadcast is composed of one or several multimedia pages and viewed like a video.
A Series is a group of a few Broadcasts, in a specific order.
A Channel is a user-branded web page containing a collection of broadcasts and series, along with a browseable category hierarchy (which is easily administered by account users) and a full-text search field.
Channels is a Premium Feature which enables users with a lot of content to easily create and maintain a directory of the content. You add and manage your own categories and subcategories, and post Series and Broadcasts under these. You can create and distribute as many channels as you like, you can administer the workflow of posting and accepting posts, you can secure the channel, restrict access, and require payment for content. The channel can be shared by email or direct link. It is also possible to embed a Channel in a website or blog – if this of interest to you, please contact us.
Personally, I can not wait to start using our channel for our help section. Until now, I have been maintaining a large number of pages in our wiki, both content pages and navigation pages. Whenever one link or subcategory changes, or I add a new category, I have to go in and manually change every navigation page and manually add links to the new content. The wiki is easy to edit – but it is time consuming! With Channels, I can simply create a Help Section Channel, and embed it on the first page of the wiki. Whenever I create a new broadcast or add a category, I make the changes quickly in the Broadcast Studio, as part of my content creation workflow. I don’t even have to visit the Help Section editor!
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Latest release – Awesome Annotations!
March 30th, 2010 by Anita Filed Under Faculte Story, New Features
Early this morning we deployed the latest version of our platform – with many small tweaks, and a total makeover of one of our renowned features.
Annotations
Our praised annotation pen – used for highlighting your message – has gone through a major makeover. Some people are good at free-hand drawing with their mouse – but most people are not. Now you can draw arrows, circles and check-marks with a click-and-drag of the mouse. You can even zoom in on the content of your page. So simple – yet so powerful and impressive!
Smaller tweaks
We have also added a group of new, beautiful sound loops to our Audio Background collection – so that your Broadcasts can be as professional and beautiful as possible!
When producing a Broadcast, you can now sort your files and broadcasts by Label. Easier navigation makes your creation process simpler and faster.
Next on our list
Ladies and gentlemen, there’s more goodies to come! In just two short weeks, we will announce our latest big feature – our developers are working around the clock on it. Stay tuned for more!
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Combining Multiple Broadcasts in a Series
March 1st, 2010 by Anita Filed Under Education, New Features
Today, we released a new exciting feature in the Faculte Broadcast Studio: “Series”. Now you can bundle several broadcasts into a single container, and share them together as a unit. When your viewer clicks on the “broadcasts series”, he or she will be able to browse through all the broadcasts in a series, and play them inside the player one by one. Click on “play” below to see a series in action.
The Series feature comes in handy when you are trying to create a “course” composed of several lessons, a “product demo” composed of a number of slideshows and videos, or a series of tutorials about a single product or subject.
A Series of broadcasts can be Shared exactly like a Broadcast – by Email, Direct Link or Embed as a Player or Widget, and it can of course also be modified on-the-fly. Access of a series can also be controlled and managed exactly as you manage and control access to a broadcast: you can make it public, require registration, protect via a password, or distribute securely to a private group. If you are monetizing your content, you can prompt your viewer to pay one sum for the entire Series, instead of on a broadcast by broadcast basis. Ever thought about creating a course and selling it on your blog? Give it a try and let us know what you think.
Creating a series is very easy. Create it, Add Broadcasts, give the Series a title and Publish it! You can also set more advanced options such as Access Restrictions and Collaboration.
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We’re pioneers, my friends.
February 15th, 2010 by Anita Filed Under Customers, Education, Faculte, Faculte Story
“Vernon, please help me. Can you figure out a way I can teach from home? Pleeeease?”, Donna Kato claims she whined to her husband, after being delayed for hours at a desolate airport, trying to make her way back home after teaching a class. “I love to teach, it’s just what it took to get to my students and home again that was really getting my goat.”, she writes in a recent blog post.
Vernon obviously could not say no to a tired, whining wife, and he started to look for solutions. They tried producing videos; it turned out to be way too expensive. They thought about creating downloadable pdf’s; they were so uninspiring. They kept searching and Donna kept traveling.
Then they stumbled across Faculte’s BETA site. To this day, none of us really know how they found us, but find us they did, and this has turned out to be a very exciting partnership for Faculte and what would eventually become CraftEdu.
Imagine the following scenario; you are at home, taking the afternoon off. You are feeling terribly creative, but have neither inspiration nor knowledge to actually create something. You step into the living room, coming to a sudden halt in the doorway: Right there, on your desk, sits metal clay artist Angela Crispin, polymer clay wizard Bettina Welker, fiber art ace Beth Wheeler, scrap-booking champion Brigitte Doss-Johnson, wirework genius Debbie Tlach, fabric printing authority Heidi Rand – in fact, there are about 50 amazing craft artists sitting right there on your desk. (needless to say; your desk is pretty full!) The artist are all eager to show you their artwork, and teach you how you can create it yourself.
This is the vision of CraftEdu - except the instructors will be available inside, not on top of, your computer, so it will not be as crowded as described above.
CraftEdu is founded by Vernon Ezell and Donna Kato, and as a modest beginning they have included 50 Arts and Crafts experts in their team. These experts have picked out their favorite pieces, and with the use of Faculte’s Broadcast Studio they are now in the process of creating online, on-demand classes available to anyone with a computer. The instructions contain step-by-step images, verbal explanations, videos – and lots of inspiration. You can follow them in your own pace, navigate the instructions to see parts of it several times, and revisit the class multiple times.
Being part of this project, the Faculte team has had the opportunity to have quite a few sneak peaks – and believe us, both the art work and the classes look awesome. Everyone is looking forward to the CraftEdu BETA launch in just a few weeks.
A few weeks ago, Donna truly realized what she got herself into, that long evening of whining in a desolate airport. To use her own words; “…there is nothing like it in the craft or art community. We’re pioneers, my friends. This may well change the way all internet instruction is presented.”
The Faculte Team is proud to be powering this amazing project!
Visit CraftEdu to learn more;
Blog
Website (under construction)
Facebook fan page
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Pre-recorded presentations; a better experience for you AND your audience?
February 10th, 2010 by Anita Filed Under Education, Faculte, Faculte Story, Presentations
For a student – and for most professionals – being able to give a good presentation or pitch is a key element of success.
Some elements can be learned through reading theory; how much text should you use per slide? How many slides are appropriate? How should your slides be structured? You can even read theory about how you should walk, talk, stand and dress, in order to make the right impression on your audience.
There is one thing, however, that only comes with experience; the knowledge of how you react to holding a presentation. Will you be able to stick to the script? Do you take detours; and where do these detours take you? Will you keep a fluent pace, or will you let your nerves get to you? Even when you are well prepared – and experienced! – your nerves can play tricks on you, and you end up rushing through the whole presentation, skipping several important points – or spending all the dedicated time on the first few slides, thus never reaching your conclusion. Not to mention all the unnecessary uh’s and ehm’s that tend to jump out of your mouth when you are nervous.
For the fall semester 2009, the Master of Science and Engineering Management Class at Marquette University used, for the first time, Faculte’s Broadcast Studio for their final Presentations. Approximately half of the groups chose to create and pre-record their presentation using Faculte, while the rest distributed powerpoint slides only. All presentations were posted on a class website, and some of them were Presented live.
Instead of me telling you how the experiment went, I will let the students do it in their own words:
“In the future I would attempt to use faculte first rather than using powerpoint.”
“I enjoyed the Faculte presentations much better than the non-faculte presentations. The Faculte presentations seemed to flow better.”
“The overall process significantly added to the quality of the presentations. If students/teams used this for all their projects, additional quality gains would accrue.”
Clearly both the students and the Faculte team were pleased with the results!
When I talked to Professor Polzcynski right after the live presentations, he had made a couple of observations that I found particularly interesting. Usually, with my theatre background, I have always claimed that “being live, in person, on stage, always gives the best results”. However, I think the Professor proved me somewhat wrong.
First, he told me that in one of the groups all but one student were traveling through work. The one student being present not an accustomed presenter, and strongly disliked being in front of an audience. Imagine his relief that their whole presentation was already created, and all he had to do was click a link and press play!
The second observation the professor shared was this: When you do a recording, you have the chance to review your work. This means that a) you write a good script and prepare well for the recording – you will actually have to listen to your own voice! and b) you re-do it if it is not good.
This resulted in the groups using Faculte having presentations that were within the dedicated time, following a comfortable pace, explaining all important points, not de-touring into unimportant details – not to mention, without the uh’s and ehm’s.
The professor said that all the presentations were good – but in the groups that used Faculte, there was not a single incident of student’s nerves or unpreparedness getting in the way of the presentation.
Knowing how you react to holding a presentation comes with experience – and I still believe that being present, in front of your audience, gives a good result. However, in using Faculte for your Presentations, you can relax! Be your charming self next to the screen, and let your nerves kick in when it is time for the questions after the presentation.
Unless, of course, you have prepared another Broadcast, with answers to all the questions you might get. Then you’re all set.
Click here to see the student’s Presentations
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