A friend always cautions during the discussions of projects to crawl, walk and then run. Mixing metaphors he suggests that we all too often screw up the order on hitting our target with the “ready, fire, aim” commands.

The movie trilogy Matrix gave us a vision of direct link to our brain that allowed us to learn things and have skill sets that were available to us from a storage system with a wealth of information. Strangely enough that was not the matrix. However, that movie showed the concept giving viability to the Matrix.

According to PEW Research 62% of us are watching videos on the Internet. That is twenty percent higher than people accessing social networks.

If you go on YouTube (News - Alert) and look around you can find training and tutorials galore. 

In short, we are looking to learn. Literally, looking to learn. And the younger you are the more you expect the resources to be available on the Internet.

In other words we are developing the knowledge base associated with the Matrix, we just don’t have the right interface and perspective yet.

We have a long way to go. Reading the Human Factors newsletter I was struck as to how wrong I was about how people watch things.

Things that I thought were good design for the web turn out to be more obscure.

Quietly I am very focused on video these days. I see the market dynamics changing and fully expect that the Internet will be our preferred method of communication. I think we have come to accept we are being watched when we are outside and that video in any form is acceptable.

Just like we see the landline market eroding and the wireless market picking up, I expect that minutes of communication will be less about calls and more about video.

In one of my product management classes we got to read some customer feedback reports from other companies. My favorite was to a computer manufacturer who told a customer to open the user manual to learn how to work his computer. The appropriate reply from the customer was “I did not go out to buy this computer for you to tell me my answers are in a book.”

So before you write a user manual. I would suggest you do some videos first.

Carl Ford (News - Alert) is a partner at Crossfire Media.

Edited by Stefanie Mosca