Ariana's Blog

Building a demo was a good experience. It was definitely easier than building a tutorial. Firstly, the main purposes of a tutorial and that of a demo are totally different. Although you can not put a clear line between a demo and a tutorial, a very rough distinction according to my view would be that a tutorial should teach people and thus should be built according to educational and psychological theories and principles, while a demo aims to inform users of what is new and persuade them into trying it.

While building this demo I did not bother highlighting the important concepts or details that users should notice. I did not aim to make users learn how to build a blog with Tinderbox. I simply showed the process very quickly, even skipping many of its steps. The narration was focused mainly on highlighting the advantages and the new features that Flint offers to Tinderbox users.

However, building a demo was not as easy as it seemed. In our case, it was a little tricky since the product that we wanted to show was not completely finished yet, and we used a pre-release version for the demo. Some features were not functioning properly or sometimes they were not functioning at all. I can now see that a tutorial for this product was impossible. However, a demo was feasible even with these obstacles.