Click to view animation

There’s also a teaser video that goes with it: a contest between two guys – we’ll call them Mark – who desperately try to order a shirt online. Watch how they’re doing with and without cookies:

Click to view who wins the cookie contest

As always, feel free to embed these videos on your own web pages.

ComScore regularly surveys the video viewing habits of people around the world.  Based on their November survey results, the average duration on a variety of video sites (mainly YouTube) was 4 minutes.  Completion rates are not given, but it is commonly known that many viewers click away from a video before it ends.

The attention span of an online video viewer is limited, which means that video makers only have a few minutes to put across a powerful, attractive story.  Whether or not that is possible depends on the nature of the content.  Most YouTube movies fall into categories such as fun, entertainment, news or … weird stuff.  For such content, even 20 seconds can be sufficient to tell the story.

As for explanatory content, getting the length shorter than two minutes may be a challenge, but that also depends on the context or subject.  Such videos usually fall into one of the following 3 categories:

• If the topic being explained does not need an introduction, either because it is introduced on the web page that includes it, or because it is a widely known subject, then the duration can be very short. For instance, a video explaining “How to tie your shoes?” can be as short as a few seconds.
   
• If the explainer video is an independent piece of content that may serve many people, sites or occasions, then the context needs to be added to it.  This means you will need an introduction to tell your audience what the video is going to be about and why the subject is relevant.  In this case, 3 minutes seems to be a good compromise between minimum explanation requirements and attention span limitations.  Most Animated Explanations fall in this category.
   
• Some subjects however, are way too complicated to cover in 3 minutes.  For example, it would be impossible to explain in 3 minutes how to become a good salesperson.  Or what the new features in Office 2007 are.  Such subjects require at least a series of videos, with a total duration of many minutes or even hours.  In such cases, it is recommendable to cut the video into smaller segments, with each one covering an independent subtopic.

Finally, the category your subject falls into also depends on your own objectives and on your target audience.  Usually, the decision to make an explainer video is part of a wider plan: a product launch, a marketing campaign, a training program, or an organizational change.  The objectives, budgets and other media that are connected with such programs may also influence the length of the explainers that become part of them.

On the other hand, customers won’t buy products or features that they don’t understand.  Why would you buy a mobile phone with HSDPA if you haven’t a clue what that means?  Why would you buy a car with ABS if you have no idea what that does?

We don’t learn these things at school, unless we specialize in a certain area. So we’re either left in the dark or … we use the Internet to find out information and explanations.

Companies often rely on their sales team to explain their products to their prospects. There are some brilliant salespeople who not only describe the features of a product, but also educate you about it and help you make an informed buying decision.  Such pre-sales customer education is necessary to ensure success in selling complex products or services.  But it is costly, time consuming and not always effective during the sales process itself: people need time to think, digest and evaluate before they finally make the decision to buy.

As McKinsey confirmed in their research about ‘the customer decision journey’, many consumers today don’t go to a shop to buy something without being prepared.  They’ll browse the web for information about products and features. They’ll Google the words they don’t understand to look for explanations. They’ll use social networks to seek recommendations, find comparisons, get feedback and read experiences.

Companies should play a more prominent role in satisfying these information needs.  Company websites should have, by default, an “education” tab in their site menu. Most sites today don’t contain educational content about the complex terminology they use. So if visitors meet a difficult word or unknown abbreviation, they’ll leave the site for a search engine, a wiki, or even worse, a competitor’s website, to find out what it means.  They may stay there and not return to the company website.

By providing educational information in an attractive format, companies give potential customers an additional reason to visit their site – and stay there for longer. Educational information should not be merely post-sales training, but pre-sales explanatory content as well.  Not just product related, but also focusing on the complex terms used to describe its features.  Most of us are specialized in one or a few areas of human life, but everyone’s a dummy in many other domains.  And so are most of the visitors to company websites.

While educating their target marketplace, companies can turn this service into a real competitive advantage. After all, the company that cares enough to explain that HSDPA feature to you may convince you to actually buy that phone from them.

Unfortunately, too many e-learning initiatives failed. Too boring, low learning outcomes, bad results. Designers and developers of e-learning content focused too much on converting the content of course textbooks into technical online versions. Paper text and pictures merely became online text and pictures. However, online students don’t read online text with the same attention as when reading text in a course book. When an e-learning course is mandatory (or when a certification or promotion depends on it) then people will take it, no matter how poor the content is. However, when the course is not mandatory, they’ll react differently. They’ll rather glance at text pages than read them. First they’ll skip a few words, then some sentences, then paragraphs and finally, they’ll skip whole pages. “Click Next to continue” becomes a handy escape or fast-forward button.

Digesting text-based content online requires curiosity, interest and attention from the viewer, as well as the discipline to read the text in a concentrated way. Only then does the message get across.

In a classroom environment, a teacher or trainer will narrate the content and often use a whiteboard or slides as visual aids. If the presenter is good, trainees will listen, follow and concentrate on the story being told. This technique works. Additionally, a good trainer can keep the class attentive by using interaction techniques such as asking questions, doing an exercise or demonstrating something.

Another technique is using “movement”. A teacher sitting behind a desk and teaching his class without moving will have a hard time keeping the attention levels high all the time. Whereas a trainer who brings movement into his lesson will be more successful in keeping the attention of the class. Movement can be anything: walking around, raising a hand, showing something, writing something on the board,… people react to visual motion.

Online motion has a similar effect. Video is motion. So is animation. Banners are animations and catch the attention because they contain moving objects. In the same way, animation can be an interesting technique for online learning, when properly used. Furthermore, animation is based on graphics, which, as opposed to video, can be very useful for learning purposes because they help to simplify complex subjects.

When a didactical storyboard is animated and synchronized well with a professional voice-over, the result can be an extremely powerful combination, which successfully grabs and keeps attention. Our animated explanations have an average attention span of over 90%. None of them are mandatory, and they are all free.

Our Animated Explanations website is only a few months old and, while it started as a showcase of animated movie formats, it took some interesting directions we really didn’t expect. 

The website started as a showcase for new Instruxion customers.  Whenever we start a sales process with new customers for customized content, the most important part is the demo.  Instruxion’s business is to make powerful animations to explain things to people.  So we listen to our customers, and if they need to explain something online to a large target audience, we can help them. 

When companies want to explain something they have a choice: sometimes they gather people in a room, ask for their attention and have a speaker, trainer or presenter do the explanation “live”.  However, when the audience is too large or widely spread geographically, this approach doesn’t scale.  So companies turn to the web as an alternative and often choose a powerful format to bring across the same story.  Recording a session and putting it online as a video is one possibility, but turning the story into a narrated animation is often much more powerful.  That’s what we do.  And that’s how Animated Explanations started: as a collection of examples to show our customers and prospects different graphical options and animation approaches. 

We hope you enjoy the showcase and find lots of inspiration for your explanations. Whenever you’re thinking about having an animated explanation, please don’t hesitate to tell us about it!