It’s a tale as old as time: the week after you publish your best product video run-through yet, the product team releases a UI update.

You have to record all over again.

Joann Ng at ActiveCampaign likens it to building a plane while flying it.

“Just as we finished with the perfect demo, we’d get hit with a new AI capability. It was like they had a built-in expiration date. We were trapped in a never-ending cycle of creating, scripting, editing, and rerecording individual demos.”

The solution here isn’t to find the best way to update individual demos.

It’s to build a system to keep your entire demo library current – with minimal manual work.

In this post, we explain what options are available to you, why HTML/CSS-based demos help you easily make tweaks, and offer 4 tips for building out your update framework.

1. Screenshots or GIFs

Pros

• Screenshots take only a couple of seconds to capture, and you can copy/paste them anywhere.
• GIFs are just as embeddable and don’t take much more time to record.

Cons

• But both require more editing than you might think.
• As soon as your UI changes, you’ll have to repeat the capture/record, edit, and re-embed process.

Navattic lets you clone a screen in your app, edit it in Navattic, and download it as a true-to-life image or pull several interactive demo screens into a GIF.

2. Looms

Pros

• Videos are a nice personal touch.
• They’re easy to record.
• They’re easy to share.

Cons

• You won’t know if a prospect watched it, unless they log in.
• You can’t send the same video to everybody, and there’s no way to personalize without re-recording.
• It’s fairly casual. If you want a more “produced” video, that will impact budget. Well-edited product videos can cost between $1,000 and $3,000 per finished minute, and take weeks to get back. You’ll have to pay again to revise it when your product changes.

Read more about whether you should use Loom to send demos.

3. Figma Files

Pros

• Easy to show designs if features aren’t quite ready for launch.
• Design teams know how to use it and can help with any necessary polish.

Cons

• It’s just a slideshow, not a live product, which can make prospects skeptical
• Every UI change means rebuilding frames from scratch
• You can’t see who went through your Figma, or how long they lingered on a particular slide

Read more about whether you should use Figma to send demos.

4. HTML/CSS Interactive Demos

Pros

• Interactive demos capture your actual product, and allow users to walk through it on their own, as if they’re using it (but are still only seeing the parts you want them to see). This encourages more engagement. According to our State of the Interactive Product Demo report, the top 1% of interactive demos have a 56% engagement rate.
• The best demos support bulk edits, making updates much quicker.
• Built-in engagement tracking so you can see how many visitors a demo got, how many of those visitors made it past step 1, made it through the whole thing, clicked on a CTA – all clues as to their intent, interests, and qualification.
• Can support screenshots and videos as well.

Cons

• It’s a new tool that takes some set up.
• Not the same as an overlay or click-anywhere demo sandbox for live calls.

HTML/CSS captures not only look pixel perfect, they make your revision process far easier.

Since you’re capturing the underlying code of every page and rebuilding it inside of your interactive demo platform, you don’t have to take a new screenshot or a new video every time your product changes.

You can remove unnecessary elements, edit text, and blur sensitive data on the existing capture.

With Navattic’s bulk editor, for instance, you can push small UI changes (renamed buttons, new banners) to every demo using that capture in one fell swoop.

Jason Oakley, Co-Founder of DemoDash, points out:

“You might have 20 different screen captures that all include the same sidebar navigation. In Navattic, you can edit one of those captures to change something in that nav or remove one of the menu items completely. When you save, it will update that nav across your entire capture collection.

You save a ton of time, but more importantly, you can really tweak and refine your captures and create this really consistent demo experience.”

Joann at ActiveCampaign used Navattic HTML/CSS captures to build 23 product tours in just three months, something that “would not have been impossible with our old video recording process.”

That alone led to a 467% surge in engaged visitors, giving Joann and her team data to identify opportunities for improvement and make edits fast.

“We leverage that strong intent to refine our messages, timing, or call-to-actions within the tour to better convert this high engagement into more completed demos.”

The goal is to make maintenance as simple and straightforward as possible – especially as your demo library grows. Here are our top tactics:

1. Use the Navattic MCP

With the Navattic MCP, you can connect your Navattic workspace to Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT, or any other LLM.

Once you’ve established that connection, you don’t have to click through the Navattic UI to edit your demos, you can just prompt an LLM to do it for you.

Via the MCP, you can edit a demo’s:

• Step copy
• Step titles
• Step content
• Buttons
• Navigation
• Beacons
• Anchors
• CTAs
• Voiceovers
• Presenter settings

And before the LLM makes any changes, it will read through your existing flow plus your workspace product and GTM context.

That way, any changes it makes will stay in line with your brand, style, and positioning.

The MCP isn’t just useful for editing and building demos, either. You can run analytics, refresh your demos, and enable sales reps to find the right demo to send in Launchpad.

Read other ways customers are using the MCP → 6 ways to use the Navattic MCPSee example Skills → Navattic Skills Library

Note: The MCP can’t take new Captures or screenshots, but can build on and edit from there.

2. Use Bulk Editors

Navattic’s Magic Editor allows you to make all kinds of advanced, dynamic edits to your captures in bulk.

You can use:

• Personalization to insert user attributes, like a name or company, that are dynamically populated for each visitor viewing your demo.
• Table AI to edit content in your tables, with a prompt like, “Please change this account list to names of edtech companies.”
• Up-to-date to automatically find dates in your capture and refresh them to current day.
• Find & Replace to replace all instances of a specific word, phrase, or image.

Get more tips for updating your interactive demos.

3. Use Workspace Captures

If you have a Navattic Base plan or higher, you can use workspace captures to centralize and reuse captures across your demos by saving them to your workspace.

That way, you don’t have to recapture the same screens over and over again.

To add captures to a specific collection:

1. Open the demo’s captures tab.
2. Open the collection menu.
3. Select Promote to workspace, and then decide whether you want to share the capture across multiple demos (globe icon) or just one project (folder icon).

4. Use Narrated Demos for Speech-to-Text Demo Creation

Another good way to speed up the demo edit process is to create a narrated demo.

A rep or SE can record their screen as they walk and talk through the product.

Navattic Copilot will then generate a demo to synchronize the voice narration and screen captures. It will also use AI to clean up filler words (“like” and “um”)

From there, you have the option to:

• Edit the text and transcript of the demo
• Strip out the cursor and voiceover to turn it into a standard interactive demo
• Change voices or add an AI avatar

Try building your first product demo today. You can sign up for free.