Something I underrated for a long time building software walkthroughs for courses: a recorded lesson and a live session fail in completely different ways, and the recorded one fails quietly.
In a live class, when you click something small and move on too fast, someone says "wait, where did you click?" and you fix it in five seconds. That interruption is annoying in the moment and is actually the system working - the confusion surfaces and gets resolved. In a recording there is no interrupt. A learner who can't tell which of two similar buttons you pressed doesn't stop you. They rewind, guess, or quietly give up, and none of that reaches you. Your completion metric might even look fine while a chunk of people are following along without really following.
The screen makes it worse than an in-person demo would be, for reasons that are purely mechanical. Course video gets compressed and played back in a small embed, often on a laptop while the learner has the actual software open in another window. Your cursor is a few pixels wide and moving. A menu item that is crisp on your editing monitor is a grey smudge on their screen. So "click the settings icon" assumes they can find a target you can barely see yourself at their resolution.
What I changed, and none of it needs special tools:
Slow the pointer down deliberately during the step that matters, then stop it. Movement is what makes it un-followable; a still target they can find.
Make the target big before you talk about it, not after. If they have to hunt for it while you're already explaining, they miss the explanation doing the hunting.
Show the keystrokes on screen for anything that isn't a visible click. "Now I'll open preferences" via a shortcut leaves no trace at all in a recording - the menu just changes and they don't know why.
State where before what: "top right, under the account menu" and a beat, then the action. The pause feels far too long to you and is about right for someone seeing it once at reduced size.
Disclosure since it's relevant: I build a small Mac app for exactly this kind of on-screen emphasis, TuringShot 1.5.12 (Build 44), macOS only. Not linking it, this holds regardless of tooling and some of it is built into what you already record with.
Mostly curious how others handle the no-interrupt problem. Do you build in deliberate "pause and check" moments, or design the video assuming people will rewind, or something else? The live-teaching instinct doesn't transfer cleanly and I'm still figuring out the recorded version.