We launched the alpha version of TripTie about a week ago to roughly 15 or so users and have already begun receiving a lot of good feedback: on what people don’t understand, how to improve things, and most importantly, all the bugs we have yet to fix. One thing that was immediately apparent was that users didn’t grasp TripTie from the get-go. They didn’t exactly understand what it was about. After playing around with it for a while and figuring out all that they could accomplish with the site, they liked it a lot. One user even commented, “I initially didn’t think it was a great idea, but now that I’m actually planning a trip, this is exactly what I need. I just didn’t know it at the time.” Getting to this basic understanding will be a challenge. So what I decided to do, was start to put together a collection of short video screencasts, describing how you can use TripTie. Here is the first of hopefully many short, informative videos: “Creating Trip Plans on TripTie” - (4 mins, 15.7mb)
June 14th, 2006 at 5:36 pm
That video was very helpful! Maybe you should include something similar (but smaller than 50MB) on the live site, as a demo for new users.
June 14th, 2006 at 7:53 pm
Thanks Karen. You know, I tried to compress it, but obviously didn’t do a very good job of it. Any recommendations of better ways to compress so that the video quality is still good? Justin suggests using Flash…any others?
June 16th, 2006 at 9:19 am
Did you exepriment anything with the different encoders? Sorensen is supposed to work really good, but my first hand experience is several years old now.
June 16th, 2006 at 3:49 pm
Svante - I tried both Sorenson and h.264 and found that h.264 compressed the video much better (about half the size of Sorenson) and with better quality. I think I should write a small post on how I made these screencasts. I’m no expert, but I did do a bit of research.