Interactive demo or screen recording: which one to send

What a screen recording is good at#

A video is the right thing when the point is the person, not the product: a walkthrough with your voice over it, a bug report where the timing matters, a message that is really "watch me do this once". It plays anywhere, and the viewer cannot get lost in it.

Its limit is that it only plays. The viewer cannot try the thing you showed, cannot go back to the one screen they care about without scrubbing, and cannot see what a menu holds unless you opened it on camera.

What an interactive demo adds#

An interactive demo is your app, replayed. Each screen is a real copy of the page, with its own styles, menus and dialogs, and every control you used while recording is live.

• It still plays like a video. Press play and a cursor clicks and types its way through what you recorded.
• Then the viewer takes over. Their first click stops the playback and the page is theirs: they open the menu, type their own value, press the button themselves.
• In any order. Nothing is locked to the order you recorded. A viewer who only wants the refund screen goes straight to it.
• Nothing to install. The link opens in any browser, with none of Replayink's interface around it.
• You see what happened. Views, unique viewers, and how far each person got.

That is what makes it the better thing to send when the viewer is deciding something: a prospect who wants to try before a call, a customer who asked "how do I…", a new teammate learning an internal tool.

Record one in Replayink#

1. Add Replayink to Chrome. It also runs in Microsoft Edge.
2. Open your web app and press Shift+R. After a short countdown a small dock shows a timer and a step count.
3. Use the app. Every click, typed value, choice, drag and scroll becomes a step, across pages and tabs.
4. Press Stop, then Share link. The address is on your clipboard.

Hold P, H, A or R while recording to draw on a screen, and what you draw is part of the demo. Shift+Space freezes the recording so you can annotate without adding steps. The full detail is in how to record an interactive demo.

Send it the way you would send a video#

• Paste the link in a chat, an email or a ticket. It opens straight into the app.
• End the link with #s=5 to open it at step 5.
• Add ?embed=1 to run it inside your docs, help centre or changelog.
• Publishing again keeps the same link, so a demo in your docs stays current.

When to send which#

• Hear you explain something once: a screen recording.
• Try the feature themselves, without an account: an interactive demo.
• Find one screen quickly, later: an interactive demo, with #s= pointing at it.
• See exactly what happened in a bug, with the timing: a screen recording.
• Learn an internal tool at their own pace: an interactive demo.

What an interactive demo cannot do#

The copy runs none of your app's code, so what works in it is what you did while recording. A button nobody pressed does nothing, and the player says so rather than pretending. Very large pages fall back to a screenshot for that step.

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