Thursday, September 11, 2008

Debilitating Demo Diseases - Zippy Mouse Syndrome

Zippy Mouse Syndrome

Symptoms: Mouse movements erratic, haphazard; movement may never stop. Mouse may circle, constantly, around certain portions of the screen. Customers turn away from the screen, get uncomfortable, and reach for the Dramamine.

Examples: Watch other people’s Remote Demos (e.g., via WebEx or GoToMeeting) – time how long before you get sick trying to follow the mouse flying around the screen:

- Sick after 3 minutes: mild, but needs treatment
- Sick after 2 minutes: moderate, treat right away
- Really sick within a minute: Severe, emergency measures required

Cure: Slow the mouse down. Sloooow the mouuuuuse doooooown…!

Move the mouse, deliberately, to the location you want – then take your hand OFF of the mouse while you talk. Repeat for your next point. This is called “Move and stop; move and stop”.

In severe cases, change the mouse speed setting in your Control Panel from “Normal” to “Painfully Slow” – this will compensate and average out to appear comfortable to the audience.

Apply treatment right away.

1 comment:

Nick Olivo said...

I do a lot of GoToMeeting sessions, and I've found that by recording my sessions, I can easily see where I'm guilty of "Zippy Mouse Syndrome", and can take steps to avoid it.

When I replay a recorded session, I'll also change the resolution of my monitor to see what it looks like to folks who may not have as high of a resolution as I do. I've found that it's best to perform the GoToMeeting at a res of about 1280x1024. That's still quite legible on a 1024x768 resolution, and looks good at higher settings too.