Help recording

I've been helping a non-technical friend out with some computer stuff recently, and it always surprises me just how much calcified computer knowledge I'm carrying around. I'm zooming from window to window, clicking through menus and things and explaining what I'm doing as I go, only to realise I've just given more detail than a reasonable human could absorb in twice the time I'm taking. Worse still, there's a severe mismatch between what we find difficult, so I sometimes skim past critically important but obvious (to me) points. Sure, I solved the problem, but the chance of my friend being able to replicate my steps on their own was basically zero.

One time I was doing this and the person I was helping said "hang on, let me get a notepad". And, honest to god, took written notes the whole time. I looked at the notes afterwards and they were... not at all what I expected. They'd written down names of programs that I opened – but those programs are in a list! You can just see them in the list! There's no need to write the names down. Well, not for me, anyway. Obviously I can pretty easily remember which program is which, but to a beginner I guess all the names and beige boxes must blend together. Most of the notes were trivial things like this, things I never would have thought to focus on.

It occurs to me that MOOCs have it right in this regard. They don't have any magical solution to the problem of teachers finding the easy stuff hard and the hard stuff easy, but it doesn't matter because they can cheat using time travel. Instead of live instruction, online courses focus on videos, and videos go at whatever pace you want. Students can fast-forward the boring bits, slow down the critical minutiae that get them lost, and play a troublesome step over and over again until they understand it. Really, it's a way of letting the students decide which parts of the lesson need the most time rather than the teachers, which turns out to be an amazing improvement.

So I think it'd be neat to bring this to computer support. Instead of forcing the long-suffering computer novice to take paper notes, just screen-record the whole session along with the audio of your voice, then give them a copy of the video when you're done. If there's anything that was a bit too dense for them to follow, they can play it back slowed down later. And this also takes the pressure off remembering unimportant details like which menu item the options are under; they know that detail is captured in the video, so they don't need to try to remember it.

What would be pretty interesting is that, with a bit of extra tooling, this could perhaps turn into a fairly compelling software product. You could add things like markers for each important step you took, build up a little library of small instructional snippets, that kind of thing. There's still a surprising number of people who have to call someone every time they want to do an unfamiliar task on a compmuter, and for them the ability to replay the help they've gotten rather than calling back might be a really big deal.