Your startup can have developed the most amazing application ever, but if your customers can’t figure out how to use it, then it’s bound to be a flop. The startup IORAD hopes to address what it calls “the most painful part of deploying applications – user training” with a tool that makes creating a tutorial incredibly simple.

One of the drawbacks of creating instructions for applications that you design yourself is that it’s easy to take for granted certain steps along the way. Arguably this is one of the downsides of creating a screencast, as you might fail to fully explain the process. As IORAD founder Sundeep Patel observes, oftentimes the lack of clarity and precision in these videos forces you to “pause, rewind, pause, rewind, so you can follow along with what they are doing.”
IORAD – the “Instructional Appliance” – is a browser-based tool that takes a screenshot with every mouse and keyboard actions. Then, the IORAD editor rebuilds the mouse path, putting a highlight box where you clicked and placing a simple text caption for each step. You also have the option to make an interactive tutorial so that the user has to perform the correct action in order to proceed. The final product can be embedded on a website or can be saved as a Word Doc, a PowerPoint or a PDF.
According to Patel, IORAD plans to add new features by the end of the year, including thirty party API integration with Flickr and pixlr.
IORAD is still in beta and plans to implement the freemium model, with an ad-supported free version and a premium one that provides more customization.
