I Recorded a 10-Minute How-To. Nobody Watched It

I do not record my screen often, so this is one job rather than a practice. It is worth writing up because it went the opposite way to what the tool promised.

I recorded a how-to for a teammate with SimpleScreenRecorder on my Linux machine, and the finished clip ran about 10 minutes. Making it took me longer than typing the same steps out would have, between setting up the recording and getting through it. Then nothing happened. No reply at all. I do not know whether it was ever opened, and the question I had answered stayed open.

What the job actually looked like

1. I decided a video would be quicker than writing the steps. This was the wrong call and it was the only decision that mattered.
2. I installed and set up the recorder, picked the capture area and checked the audio before starting.
3. I walked through the steps on screen in one pass, at the speed a person talks, which is far slower than the speed a person reads.
4. I ended up with a file of about 10 minutes, sent it, and waited.
5. No reply came. The steps were never confirmed as followed, so the handover did not happen.

The cost sits with the person receiving it

A written set of steps can be skimmed in 20 seconds, searched for the one command you forgot, and pasted from. A 10-minute video asks for 10 uninterrupted minutes before it gives up anything at all, and it gives nothing back in a search. Someone busy will put that aside for later, and later does not reliably arrive.

I was weighing my own effort when I made the clip. The recording moved the work onto the other person instead, and neither of us had agreed to that.

About the tool itself

SimpleScreenRecorder is a free program by Maarten Baert, GPL v3, packaged for Arch, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo and Ubuntu among others. It recorded exactly what I asked it to. The tool worked; the decision to use it was mine, and that is the part that failed.

When a recording is still the right call

Record when the thing is genuinely visual and short: a glitch you cannot put in words, or a sequence of clicks where the order matters. Keep it under about two minutes, and write the steps underneath it anyway so the video is the illustration and not the only copy.

For anything that is really a list of instructions, type the list. I would have been finished sooner, and I would have had a reply. The same instinct applies to sending anyone a file at all: I think about what the person on the other end has to do with it, which is also how I ended up choosing where to merge a PDF.