Let’s face it; technical material can be difficult to comprehend, even for the most motivated audience. This is why so many technical documents are not read. Viewers lack the time and stamina to navigate through complex descriptions of ideas. The problem is that traditional technical documents present ideas in a linear fashion. A detailed figure might be presented, and then it may take several paragraphs to explain the figure. The viewer is forced to go back and forth between the figure and the explanatory text.
Animation offers exciting new possibilities for presenting technical material. There are two important aspects that overcome the problem of linear presentation inherent in traditional documents.
- Voice-over
- Animation
Voice-over enables the viewer to study diagrams while listening to narration. In a sense, two activities that are revealed sequentially in traditional documents are now presented in parallel, making it much easier for the viewer to grasp the ideas.
Animation is effective because it simulates an activity that has been used for centuries—the process of writing on a chalkboard. The power of the chalkboard is not so much the figures themselves, but the progressive disclosure brought about by the action of drawing the figure. Animation plays upon this phenomenon. It can show how something is constructed; it can indicate direction; it can draw attention to particular components of a figure.
To illustrate the power of using video to explain technical material, we created one to explain the operation of the JTAG TAP controller. Many test engineers have spent hours studying the TAP controller’s block diagram and state machine, whereas this video is able to efficiently cover this material in less than 6 minutes.