Best Practice: Minimizing the Visibility of the Cursor during Playback

Practice makes perfect:

Before recording try going through the click path a few times so you know exactly where to click without hesitation. That way when you are recording you move the cursor exactly each time to each click. This will minimize the potential for your cursor to go off course and lead the viewer astray.

Don’t touch the mouse:

While waiting for pages, visuals, UI, etc., to load take your hand off the mouse while you wait as most builders tend to move the mouse around unconsciously. This will minimize the viewer from seeing any unnecessary movements that could be distracting. 

Changing the cursor target to 5 or 10 pixels:

To help minimize the visibility of the cursor while recording you can change the ClickTarget - Diameter to 5 or 10 pixels. This will make it so while recording you can see the cursor but it won’t be too distracting to the viewer. In playback mode the final click target will be larger circles so there will be no impact from that perspective.

Lead-in Skips:

When there is nothing happening on the screen and you are moving from one area of focus to the next a great way to eliminate the cursor moving from feature area to feature area is to use the lead-in speed. In these situations you should change it to Skip.

Here is an example of a normal speed option:

Here is an example of using the skip speed:

You will notice that this creates a way more seamless and streamlined viewer experience. To achieve this, in the edit screen, you simply need to adjust the lead-in speed to skip as shown below:

If you want to learn more about editing a product tour, visit this article here.