A one deliverable solution for consumers and training, with the help of visual media, is becoming a reality.
Keith Kamikawa, Social Media Account Manager & Visual Media Team Animator
Visual media is communication through such means as video, animation, illustration, and interactive software.
Visual Media has always been in professional technical publications, operator manuals, technical manuals, and instruction manuals. We recently talked to a client of ours who is a Technical Publications Manager at a large industrial manufacturer. Her workload has shifted from creating only traditional written technical publications to spending over half of her time creating video training projects, a very dramatic shift.
Another client has no choice but to use CAD animation for technical publications and training since their machines are impossibly large and expensive to ship.
Why are companies shifting from the traditional written method to a more visual one?
Visual Media has always been in professional technical publications, operator manuals, technical manuals, and instruction manuals. When work instructions were originally created visual media was used to augment these technical publications. Crude hand drawn illustrations were sometimes drawn by the product’s creator and included, as the visual media, in these early manuals. The value of even these simple drawings was obvious to the new owners of the product.
Later, photography and well-crafted illustrated line art became the standard to accompany text in manuals, and we’re now seeing a push for video and animation in the world of technical publications and training. eLearning and gameification in training is commonplace and, in the not so distant future, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality will be mainstream deliverables.
Having Visual Media as a main focus in technical publications bypasses the costs of lengthy translations and avoids the pitfalls of literal translation.
When paired with visual media, simplified technical english has a high impact for comprehension.
Line Art, renders, animation, and realtime 3D assets are some of the many different types of visual media that can be created from one CAD source.
Reuse of the asset for many different deliverables is an advantage in CAD based visual media.
When it’s impossible to ship product due to size or cost visual media virtual training makes it possible to work on your product virtually.
Visual media focused training is universally understood without the need for text.
Short videos or animations targeted to a specific purpose allows the user to decide precisely what they want when they want it.
Hands on video demonstrations of the same product can offer portable tutorials for training on the go.
Having bite sized visual media content online or downloadable on the go gets your information to your users quickly.
Hosting visual media based training online or downloadable allows users to conveniently access your content where ever they are.
Content that is visually appealing, bite sized, on the go, and interactive caters directly to your Millennial and upcoming iGeneration audiences.
Use attractive visual media content for social media and other promotional purposes.
3D modeling and rendering of products offer variety and customization in visual media.
Companies are depending on Visual Media for internal training and forgoing the traditional paper instructions. Blurring the line of technical publications and employee training is becoming an in demand option. A one deliverable solution for consumers and training, with the help of visual media, is becoming a reality.
Bite sized, focused, and a direct clear message is why visual media, specifically video and animation, are some of our client’s training medium of choice.
Video is currently the largest growing medium in training today.
As you can see these benefits show how strong of a role visual media can play in technical publications and training.
