When you need to show someone how your product works, there are three usual answers: record your screen, build an interactive demo, or write a guide with screenshots. Teams tend to pick whichever one they made last time. Each format is good at different things, and the wrong one costs you in ways that are easy to miss: a video nobody finishes, a demo nobody can find in search, a guide nobody follows.
Here’s how we think about the choice. We make a tool for the last two, so read our take on video with that in mind. We’ve tried to be fair to it, because for some jobs it’s the right answer.
What a video does well
A screen recording with a voice over it is the most human of the three. You hear a person explain why something matters, with their own emphasis and pauses. That makes video the strongest format for:
- Telling a story. A founder walking through why the product exists, a launch teaser, a customer’s before and after.
- Showing things that move. Animations, real-time collaboration, a dashboard updating live, how fast something loads. A sequence of still screens can’t show speed.
- Feeds and channels built for it. Social feeds, video platforms and conference screens are made for video. An interactive demo doesn’t play inside a social post.
- Things that aren’t on a screen. Hardware, a person using the product on a phone at a counter, anything physical.
Its weaknesses show up later. Viewers can only watch, at your pace, so they can’t skip to the one step they need or try it themselves. You can’t search inside it. Translating it means subtitles at best and new recordings at worst. And when your interface changes, the video is wrong until someone records it again. That’s often months, because re-recording is a project.
What an interactive demo does well
An interactive demo is a series of real screens from your product that the viewer clicks through. A guided demo leads them along one path with a tooltip on each step. A clickable demo lets them explore linked screens in any order.
It’s the strongest format for:
- Letting people try before they talk to you. On a homepage or after a sales call, clicking through the product feels closer to using it than watching someone else use it.
- Different viewers wanting different things. A branching demo can ask “What brings you here?” and show the admin and the end user different paths. A video shows everyone the same thing.
- Knowing what happened. Because each step is a separate click, you can see where viewers stopped, which path they chose and who finished. Video analytics tell you how much was watched, not what the viewer was trying to do.
- Keeping up with a changing product. Changing a tooltip, a label on a captured page or a blurred area is an edit, not a reshoot.
It has real limits too. An interactive demo needs a web page to live on: it can sit in your site, your docs or a shared link, but not inside an email or a social post. It shows screens, not speed or motion. And a demo that tries to cover everything becomes a slow, worse version of a free trial. The good ones are short and make one point.
What a written guide does well
A numbered list of steps with a picture of each is the least exciting format and often the most useful.
- Reference. When someone has done a task before and just needs to remember step four, they want to scan, not watch or click through from the start.
- Search. Search engines and your help center’s search box can index written steps word for word. To them, a video or a demo is mostly a title and a description.
- Pasting and sharing. Someone can paste the steps into an internal wiki, a ticket reply or a training doc, and print them.
- Accessibility. Text works with screen readers, translation tools and slow connections.
Its weakness is the gap between reading and doing. A guide for a complex interface asks the reader to switch between the instructions and the product and to find each button themselves. The screenshots also drift out of date one redesign at a time, and nobody notices until a customer does.
Match the format to the job
| The job | Usually best | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A launch teaser in a social feed | Video | It plays where people already are |
| A product tour on your homepage | Interactive, guided | Visitors try it at their own pace, and you see where they leave |
| A follow-up after a sales call | Interactive, clickable | The buyer’s team can explore on their own time |
| “How do I…?” in your help center | Interactive and written | The walkthrough for doing it, the steps for scanning |
| An internal process or SOP | Written, with a walkthrough | People come back to it as a reference |
| Showing speed, motion or live updates | Video | Still screens can’t show time |
| A conference talk or a webinar | Video, or a live demo | A person on screen holds attention |
Four questions that settle most cases
- Does the viewer need to do this themselves afterwards? Then they need something they can follow step by step and come back to: an interactive demo, a written guide, or both.
- Where will they be when they see it? In a feed or an inbox, video or a link. On your site or in your docs, any format works.
- How soon will the interface change? If it changes every few weeks, pick the format that’s cheapest to update. That’s rarely video.
- Do you need to know what happened? If the answer shapes a sales call or tells you which help article is failing, you want step-level data.
Use more than one
The formats work best together. A 30-second video on social that links to an interactive tour. A walkthrough embedded at the top of a help article with the written steps underneath. A sales follow-up with a clickable demo for the buyer and a written guide the champion can paste into their internal doc.
The trouble with using all three is that you make the same thing three times, and then update it three times.
How AtriumKit handles the last two
AtriumKit makes interactive demos and written guides from the same recording. You click through your product once with the Chrome extension, and every click becomes a step.
- You choose a guided demo (one path, a tooltip per step, branching if you need it) or a clickable one (linked screens to explore freely).
- When you publish, the demo is also a step-by-step guide at its own address, with a picture for every step. You can copy it into Notion, Google Docs or Confluence, download it as Markdown or print it.
- When the product changes, you edit the demo and publish again, and the guide changes with it.
- If you want a voice, add a voiceover to the demo, with captions, in each language you translate it into.
For a video, AtriumKit’s video studio (in beta) turns a demo into a short motion video with narration, music and captions, and exports an MP4: a launch teaser or a social clip made from the same screens. It doesn’t record your screen, so for a live walkthrough with your face and voice, use a screen recorder. For the jobs where people need to follow along, try it themselves or look something up later, record your first demo and see which of the two your audience uses.