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Posted November 1, 2022
According to Ywzowl 96% of people have watched an explainer video to learn about a product or service. No huge surprise there - we’ve all done it (or, at least 96% of us have). Many of these explainers consist of the video (with or without music) and on-screen titles providing the details or instructions. But without a voice over narrating those titles/instructions, your clients or endusers may become quite frustrated.
I had a very common experience the other day that brought this problem to light.
I needed to fix my kitchen faucet, and after a quick Google search, saw that the faucet company has hundreds of videos explaining how to fix any number of problems that could beset any number of their products, past and present. Great - I found my product video quickly.
Next, while tapping my toes to the cheerful background music playing in the video, I balanced my phone in one hand while attempting to use a screwdriver with the other to do something to my faucet that they were demonstrating in the video.
The problem was - I had no idea what I was supposed to do.
Watching on my phone, the on-screen instructions were printed in such small font that I couldn’t read them. So I had to put down my screwdriver, pause the video and pinch the screen to zoom into the text that explained what to do.
But - that’s the whole point of an explainer video - to simply and easily explain something. If it doesn’t do that the first time around, it’s failed at its purpose.
Here’s the self-serving part of this story: A simple voiceover to tell me the instructions of what to do would have saved me a ton of frustration.
The moral of this story? While the 96% stat is impressive, we also need to remember that a huge majority (90% according to inc.com) of those views are on phone-sized screens, where text is not your friend. Customers are using these explainer videos to solve a problem, and so they’re often watching under less-than-optimal conditions - for example, contorting oneself perched on a countertop while hunched over a faucet trying to watch a video on a screen the size of a postage stamp (or so it seemed at the time).
It doesn’t take much to add a voiceover (in addition to any cheerful music - we don’t want to forget about that) to make a customer’s experience with explainer videos that much better. To delight your customer, rather than disappoint them.