Your video tutorials age faster than your product

How do you keep video tutorials up to date? It’s harder than it looks. You recorded a great tutorial three months ago. Since then, your team has shipped twelve releases. A button moved, a menu was renamed, a screen was redesigned. The video hasn’t changed: it shows a product that no longer exists.

Why video tutorials go out of date after an update

A video tutorial is a snapshot of your product at a single point in time. Your product changes every week. With every release, the gap quietly grows.

Three things make this hard:

• Nobody knows which videos are wrong. You’d have to rewatch every video after every release. Nobody has time for that.
• Redoing a video takes days. Script, record, re-record, voiceover, edit, captions, translation: that’s eight steps for a single tutorial.
• Your customers notice before you do. “I’m following the video, but I can’t find the button.” That message lands with support, not the product team.

An outdated tutorial costs more than a missing one: first it wastes people’s time, then it costs you their trust.

How to keep video tutorials up to date: treat them like code

Teams whose tutorials stay accurate do one simple thing: they keep tutorials next to their code, and they check them the same way they check code.

1. Tutorials live in the repo. One file per tutorial, reviewed in a pull request like everything else.
2. Every pull request checks them. Before you merge, you know which tutorials a change affects or breaks.
3. Every release updates them automatically. Only the affected videos are redone. The rest stay as they are.

That’s exactly what Ondaclip does. It replays your tutorials on your real app, compares each screen with the published video, and shows you a before and after of what changed. The video above shows this in the studio, and how it works walks through each step.

What accurate tutorials mean for support, product and engineering

• Support hears “I can’t find the button” a lot less often.
• Developers see in their pull request that a tutorial is about to break, and decide whether it’s a bug to fix or a tutorial to update.
• Product ships every release without leaving an outdated video behind.

Where to start: your three most-watched tutorials

Pick the three tutorials your users watch most. They’re the ones that cost you the most when they’re wrong. Put them in your repo and let every release check them. The quickstart gets you there in fifteen minutes.