Mistakes that lose viewers

Demos fail in a small number of recognisable ways, and none of them are about production value. They are about attention: every one of these hands the viewer a reason to stop watching before the part you cared about.

The runway and the tour

Two versions of the same mistake. The **runway** is everything before the interesting thing: the login, the navigation, the tour of the sidebar, the explanation of what we are about to see. The **tour** is showing the product's structure rather than its use — here is the dashboard, here is settings, here is the export panel. Both come from wanting to be thorough and both lose the viewer, because neither answers the only question being asked, which is *what does this do for me*. Start at the action and show one task from beginning to end. Structure is what documentation is for.

Unreadable text

The most common technical failure, and it is decided at recording time. A maximised window on a big monitor scaled down to 1080p makes body text about six pixels tall, which is unreadable on a laptop and invisible on a phone. Zooming afterwards magnifies pixels that were never there. The fixes are all at the source: resize the window before recording, raise the application's own zoom level, and remember that a demo posted to a feed will be watched at the size of a playing card. If you cannot read the text on your phone, neither can anyone else.

Motion sickness

Too many zoom moves, moves that are too fast, moves that pull all the way back out to wide between two nearby targets, and moves that arrive and leave before anything can be read. Any of these turns a demo into something people scroll past for reasons they would describe as "it felt weird". Two or three moves in thirty seconds, each holding long enough to read, with nearby moves chaining directly instead of bouncing out. Motion should point at things; when there is more motion than content, it points at nothing.

Faked things, and silence assumptions

Do not invent a cursor, a click ripple, a notification, or a result. A viewer who spots one fabricated element re-evaluates everything else in the video, and they spot them more often than people expect. That is why nothing here draws a cursor and why the browser frame's address bar stays empty unless you type one. The other half of this is assuming sound: most demos are watched muted in a feed, so anything explained only in narration is not explained. Whatever must be understood should be visible on screen — which is also why silent demos travel further and need no re-recording when the language changes.