From Complex to Clear With Training Videos

About Sixclear

Based in Austin, Texas, Sixclear is an engineering company offering training, development, integration, and consulting for a software product called LabVIEW in the automation, test, measurement, and data acquisition space.

The Challenge

LabVIEW isn't your basic software--it's an extensive graphical programming language. "So seeing someone put the pieces together onscreen is absolutely essential to the success of our business," said Brian Spears, co-founder of Sixclear.

Since 2008, Brian and the team at Sixclear have been using Camtasia to help solve the challenge of visually explaining this feature-rich software.

Brian co-developed and recorded the Sixclear LabVIEW Fundamentals course using Camtasia Studio. “We can honestly say that our Sixclear LabVIEW Fundamentals course would not exist without Camtasia,” said Brian. “It stood hands-down as the winner of our evaluation of screen recording software and validated our decision to invest a huge chunk of our time to develop and record the course.”

A Few Ways Sixclear is Using Camtasia:

1. It was used to create all of the recorded content (approximately 35 hours) in the Sixclear LabVIEW Fundamentals online course.
2. It is used continuously to publish video content to VI High, the LabVIEW programming video blog.
3. Sixclear often does remote consulting, development, troubleshooting, and debugging with their customers. They use Camtasia to record sessions with customers, produce the videos, and then send a video to the customer for review at a later time.
4. For internal training, the Sixclear team records themselves performing common tasks that they would like to delegate to other coworkers.

The Results

Sixclear seeks to make the training process easier to adopt by lowering the cost and time lost at work that often accompanies LabVIEW training. “Before our video programming course, the best way to train people on LabVIEW was to meet with an instructor and go through training in person, which would often take a week or more,” said Brian. “We don’t want a potential LabVIEW user to see training as an obstacle to the greater productivity the software offers. The training should be as simple and intuitive as LabVIEW itself.”

Brian has seen the success of their efforts in feedback from customers, affiliates, and collaborators. “They’re always mentioning how easy it is to follow along with our video tutorials,” he said. “The ease with which we can record and produce videos is directly correlated with the amount and quality of the videos, which in turn increases sales and collaboration with companies in our space.”

Sixclear also tracks the actions their users take on the Camtasia-produced videos in the Sixclear LabVIEW Fundamentals course. “We have recorded around 130,000 views of these videos since the course released in January 2010. That translates to more than 1,000 times per week that our customers are acting on those videos,” said Brian.