Determining Speed of Demo Captions

Our team uses a similar approach to Erik's. We've found that using a demonstrative approach (read about it, then do it and base your timing on this) tends to work much better with a cross-section of users. While it might get a little repetitive to your 'higher-end' users, you'll do a good job at catching the middle.

I'm in agreement with Steve - but consider whether a Next button is
really the best way to navigate. Far better, if possible, to use some
other interaction to let the user advance - especially for software
simulations which Captivate is largely intended for.

Look at your course and see if there's any better way for the user to
advance. For example, if the current instructions is:
"Double-clicking on the My Computer icon will show Windows Explorer with
a list of the system's hard drives and CD drives. Click Next to continue."
change that to:
... Click the My Computer icon to continue."

We rarely, if ever, allow informational text to fade-out without some
sort of interaction from the user - for exactly the 'slow reader'
reasons you state. But also agree just clicking 'Next' can be
aggravating. Consider better ways to allow users to move through the
information - which also helps the user actually retain the information.
Erik

dukekelly wrote:
> My team is having a huge debate regarding how long a caption should stay on the
> screen so that a user can read it comfortably. I'm going to try and present
> this objectively so I can get unbiased opininons from you.
>
> -I have one very slow reader on my team, who would prefer I put a continue
> button on each caption so that she controls the timing individually. I have
> other users who feel that this is repetative and annoying.
>
> -If I give the captions enough time for the slow reader, the faster readers
> become impatient and lose interest in the demo altogether.
>
> -If I try to find a medium speed, I end up losing the slower readers, who then
> have to replay the entire demo. Even the automatic calculation time through
> Captivate seems to fast for some of these people.
>
> -I have screens of introductory text from PowerPoint, where I put a Next
> button. If I allow use of the Captivate playback controls, it deactivates
> these buttons until the user clicks the Play button on the playback control.
> This is very confusing to the user. I have to pause the screen for them to
> read it, so I can't just get rid of the buttons.
>
> Any suggestions or ideas as to how you are dealing with this issue? The
> sample files that are on the Macromedia website just seem to pick a medium
> speed and stick with it.
>

--
Erik Lord
http://www.capemedia.net
Adobe Community Expert - Authorware
http://www.macromedia.com/support/forums/team_macromedia/
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For what it is worth, we rarely, if ever, use self playing movies. Instead, we always use a Next button that the end user clicks when they are ready to advance. This allows fast readers to move faster and slow readers to move slower without dictating that to them. Beyond having a self-running kiosk type application, I have never understood why people insist on dictating to the end user how fast or slow they have to read something....it is a losing proposition since you can never accomodate everyone's speed.