The best walkthroughs are made by people close enough to the learning curve to remember where it was steep. That window closes fast, which is why buying it from someone outside your team works.
What to put in the public brief
- That screen recording plus voice narration is required
- The rough product category and platform
- Target length and the flow to cover, as a start and an end point
- The licence, in plain terms
- Whether their face appears at all
Keep product access and any credentials private.
What to put in the private instructions
Give access and a named endpoint
"From account creation to a shared link" defines the video. Without an endpoint you will get a tour.
Ask them to do it once untimed first
Then record the second pass. The first attempt is where they get lost; the second is what a viewer can follow. Paying for both is what makes the second one good.
Ask them to narrate the wrong turns
Not to edit them out. "I thought that was in settings, it is actually here" is the most useful sentence in any tutorial and the first thing polish removes.
State the resolution and whether to hide personal detail
Notifications, bookmarks, other tabs. Cheaper to say than to redact afterwards.
Proof worth requiring
Ask for
The raw recording with audio as a single file, and the endpoint they reached.
Do not ask for
An edited, music-scored final cut. Amateur editing on a screen recording is where these go wrong, and you can always cut a raw file yourself.
When this task type is the wrong tool
If you need a polished product film, this is not it — brief a producer with a script.
If you want to know where people get lost rather than a video about it, an onboarding test answers that faster and costs less. Do that first, then commission the walkthrough once you have fixed what it found.