Auditing your help-center video tutorials after a production release

Why an audit, not just a re-read

After a production release, nobody reopens the help-center tutorials. A renamed button or a reorganised screen makes a video wrong without any alert. The first signal often comes from a customer, through a support ticket.

An audit replaces that late discovery with a methodical review. It takes half a day for a catalog of about thirty videos, and you redo it for every major release.

The six steps

1. Take inventory: title, flow shown, software version at recording time, languages, and the help-center page where the video is embedded.
2. Rank by criticality: flows every new user follows (sign-in, first creation, export) come before rare features.
3. Cross-check with the release notes: for each interface change, look for the videos that show the screen concerned. A label, an icon, the order of fields or a moved menu is enough to make a video wrong.
4. Replay each critical flow by hand in a demo environment, with the video next to you, and note every gap: a step that no longer exists, a missing button, a different result.
5. Give each video a state: current, to redo, or to retire. A video to retire beats a wrong video that stays online.
6. Name an owner per tutorial and set the next review: every production release that touches the screen concerned.

What to redo first

Start with videos that are wrong on a flow many users follow, then those whose gap blocks the user (a button that no longer exists), and last those with a cosmetic gap (a color, an icon). A video that is slightly dated but right in substance can wait.

Signals that should trigger a review

• A release note mentions a label, a menu or a screen that changed.
• An interface redesign, even partial, touches a module that has tutorials.
• A change of rights or roles alters what a new user sees.
• Support receives several tickets like “I can't find the button in the video”.
• A language is added: existing videos have to be reviewed with the new language's screens.

What the audit does not solve

A manual audit is a snapshot: three months later you have to do it again. The real cost is not the audit, it is re-recording each video by hand afterwards. That is what Democlap automates: the tutorial is described by a script, replayed in your demo environment on every production release, and if a step no longer works, nothing is published and the last good video stays online.