It’s been more than 20 years since Windows 98 crashed live on stage during a demo by Bill Gates. Steve Jobs was notorious for getting upset when demos failed. While we have seen a tremendous amount of technological innovation since then and an explosion of software solutions across many industry verticals, product demos still often fail. Demo preparation does not only take a lot of time, money and resources to develop, but delivering them to their proper target audiences poses challenges as well. We are not going back to in-person meetings anytime soon, and the multitude of conferencing and video software in the market makes it difficult to know whether the demo will work properly or be experienced the way it was intended to be.

And that brings us to the issue of UX and customer experience more broadly: Most demos are static, often boring, and cobbled together from a variety of media formats, which doesn’t result in the desired customer experience of the product.