January 24, 2025

How to Make Better Tutorial Guides

There are many good reasons to want to make tutorials. You might be marketing a new product, educating employees, or simply sharing unique knowledge that you have with the rest of the world.

Your success depends heavily on the quality of your tutorials, so what steps can you take to make even better tutorials in the future?

Use the Right Screen Recording Product

You’ll probably need to use a screen recorder to create your tutorials, and possibly in multiple ways. You can use screen recording to track all of your interactions in a piece of software and demonstrate key techniques for mastering it. 

At the same time, the screen recording software will record your narration, so you can explain what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. When you’re done, you can edit and mark up your video to highlight key areas or draw viewer attention to certain things. It’s a way to make your tutorial more focused and more engaging.

With the right screen recording software, it’s going to be much easier for you to create your tutorial guides. If the controls are intuitive and the software is reliable, you can save considerable time and ultimately create a better product.

Use a Quality Microphone

Similarly, you should invest in the best microphone you can afford. Good microphones have much higher sound quality, and they do a better job of filtering out potentially distracting noises and interference.

When recording, it’s also important to take precautions to eliminate any audio signals that might take away from your narration. That typically means eliminating sources of distracting sound, installing soundproofing or sound absorbing materials, and recording in the right place.

There are ways to edit and improve your sound after the recording is done, but you’ll be in a much better position if you make improvements before and during the actual recording.

Prepare a Storyboard and/or Script (and Practice)

Storyboarding is a graphic organizing strategy designed to illustrate the key images or video segments in an upcoming piece of media. It can be an effective tool for outlining what you want to show your viewers and how you want to show it to them. You can also write a script to guide your voice-over narration. Even if you don’t have these formal tools in place, it’s important to rehearse your intended tutorial before you actually record it. This way, you can demonstrate more competence and confidence in your presentation.

Keep It Short

Attention spans are limited, and they seem to keep getting shorter. If you want people to pay full attention to your tutorials, you need to keep them short and concise. In most cases, a suitable video tutorial is only a few minutes long. If you have more ground to cover, simply make more videos in sequential order, rather than artificially extending the length of a single video.

Introduce the Topic and Key Objectives First

With each video tutorial you create, start by introducing the topic and key objectives. This doesn’t have to take long, but it should let all your viewers know exactly what you’re going to cover, why you’re going to cover it, and what your viewers will be able to do after watching it.

Organize Your Content Logically

From there, make sure to organize your content logically. Each section should flow smoothly and in a way that’s readily apparent to your viewers, and you should consider using numbered lists and other visual tools to make your organization more apparent.

Speak Clearly and Slowly

In your narration, speak as clearly and slowly as possible. This will greatly increase comprehensibility as well as retention for your viewers. If this doesn’t come naturally to you, it may require some focused practice.

Show Off Your Personality

Some video tutorial creators are tempted to follow a strict, professional style in their presentation. Although this is suitable for some contexts, in most cases it’s better to show off your personality authentically. People are much more likely to connect with you and engage with your material if you’re sincere in your approach.

Get Feedback and Improve

Finally, make sure you get feedback from people who have seen and used your tutorials, so you can improve in the future.

  • Ratings. Ask your viewers and users to rate your video tutorials, then see how different tutorials compare to each other. What do the best ones have in common?
  • Surveys. You can also use qualitative surveys to get more specific information about what viewers like and don’t like in your tutorials.
  • Viewer engagement metrics. And of course, you can also turn to viewer engagement metrics to objectively measure how people respond to your presentations.

With these strategies, you should be in a position to make much better video tutorials. It’s an art that takes practice and refinement, but if you start with the right fundamentals, it will be much easier.

About the author 

Kyrie Mattos


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