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For the past several months, I’ve been conducting the majority of our online product demonstrations. I’ve gotten to speak personally with so many of our customers. It’s been a lot of fun and a great learning experience. As a developer, it’s extremely eye opening when you start seeing exactly how our products are used once they get into the customer’s hands.
Despite all these great things, this morning I was thinking about the one negative. Specifically, the repetition the presenter – in this case, me – has to go through to perform these demos. Generally speaking, our demos walk customers – very thoroughly – through a typical interfacing scenario from start to finish. A lot of the process is the same each time we go through it. I’ve always wondered if things would be easier if we offered a series of video-based demos that could be watched – on-demand – followed by a meeting to discuss and answer questions.
At the heart of that question is this simple fact: While our typical demos range anywhere from 60 to 90 minutes, the core process of creating a functional interface can actually be completed in about 10 minutes!
Don’t believe me? For the doubters, I put together a quick video showing the creation of an HL7 interface that receives an ADT message (LLP) and parses the demographic information into a database. From start to finish – including sending the message, verifying the results in the database and even having a look at the logs – the entire process was done in just over 11 minutes. No tricks, no editing – a working interface, with instructions, in a matter of minutes.
My quickly “produced” video does lack a little polish – as it was shot in one take – but for now, I just wanted to prove it could be done. I guess my question to anyone reading this is: How useful would it be to you if we were to start breaking up some of our core tasks/lessons and offering them in video format?
I’d also love to hear from those of you out there who have either performed demos, recorded demos or have even just seen a great pre-made demo online. If you’ve run across similar issues – namely repetitiveness – how did you go about solving it?
Have a look at my brief video below, and let me know your thoughts.
–Art
I’d say this is an excellent idea. Many of our leaps forward were realized after spending time with Eliot discussing problems and seeing basic functionality we were not aware existed.
I suppose the trick will be to create content that is relevant enough that people will actually watch it.
At Pharmacy OneSource we release videos after every update which detail the changes. These videos are available direct within the application. This has proven pretty effective for us in keeping our users informed.
Hmmm – what would be good topics to show?
Very good – clearly shows how your products relate which I was struggling with before
when will we see a video for sending messages?
Hi Jason – thanks for the kind words. You requested and we listened – here’s a link to our newest blog entry and demo video: Sending HL7 Messages – The Movie. Hope that helps!
This is a great jump start introduction. Your online text tutorials were a big help in learning HL7 and convinced me to go with Interfaceware.
I think its very useful to the developers who r in healthcare domain
Is the flash file on the vidio page downloadable, and if I want to watch off line, how do I do? I failed to download it from website.
thanks!
Hi Jenifer,
I’ve added a copy of the video to the site Vimeo, so if you’re unable to watch it here, you should be able to click the link below and watch/download it from there.
HL7 Demo
-Art
As presenter of educational software to K-12 market, I must congratulate you on your video. Very clear and precise and takes away alot of the prep work that goes into a demo to get your message across. We have similar standard in the education market call SIF
So your idea has given me some ideas on how to teach my sales rep to present better. I agree with the other responders that balloons or bubbles would help visually as there is a lot of dialogue you are presenting. Since this is a intro video. You could have some recaps after each segment in a bullet format to re-emphasize that segment. Overall excellent
Richard