How to run a live software demo people can follow along with
People following a live demo spend their effort keeping up, not understanding. Seven habits that keep the whole room with you, from the research on live coding.
ยท 4 min read
You are working through something live: a formula, a query, a setup, a few lines of code. The people watching are doing it alongside you, or writing it down to do later. Then you scroll, or switch to another file, and some of them lose the thread. The ones who fall behind rarely say so. They just stop trying to keep up.
Researchers studying live coding keep hearing the same thing. A student in a study of live coding in classrooms described what it took to keep up in person:
"I realized quite soon that I have to sit all the way in the front for me to pay attention in class"
A student, in Berger, Weintrop & Elmqvist (2025)
Online, there is no front row to sit in.
Where the effort goes
Following a live demo is two jobs at once. One is understanding what you are doing and why. The other is capturing it: reading it off the screen, typing it out, checking it is spelled right, before you move on. The second job is pure overhead, and it competes with the first.
A 2025 study at ICER, the computing education research conference, measured this directly. Students who took notes with a tool that captured the instructor's code for them reported a lower workload, kept up more easily and wrote more complete notes than students using a plain editor. Notes alone are not learning, though. In that short lab session the better tool did not raise quiz scores. The point is narrower: when keeping up costs less, people have their attention back for the part that matters.
Source: Manesh, Wu, Chen & Lee (2025). Understanding and Improving Student Note-Taking in Live Coding Lectures. ICER '25.
So the aim is to take as much of the capturing job off the people watching as you can.
Seven habits that keep the room with you
1. Say what you are about to do, then do it
"Next I'm going to add a filter on the date column." One sentence before you touch anything gives people a moment to look in the right place, and something to check against when they try it themselves.
2. Hold still while they catch up
When you have just typed something people need, don't scroll it away. Leave it on screen, say "take a second with this," and wait. Scrolling, switching tabs and closing panels are what lose people, much more than speed of typing.
3. Give them the text, not just the picture
Anything people need to type exactly, such as commands, formulas, file paths and links, should reach them as text. Paste it into the chat as you go, or prepare a short document they can open beside you. Nobody should have to read a long string off a shared screen and retype it character by character.
4. Build in checkpoints
Decide a few points where everyone should have the same result: "At this point your sheet should show a total of 4,210." People who fell behind know exactly what to catch up to, and people who are ahead know they got it right.
5. Keep one thing on screen
Close what you aren't using. One window, one file, one view. Every extra panel is somewhere else for eyes to wander, and something else people think they need to copy.
6. Make it readable before anyone has to ask
If people are squinting, they are falling behind. Raise your display scale and font size before you start. There is a full list in how to make your screen share readable.
7. Tell them there is a replay, and what it is for
If you are recording, say so at the start. People relax when they know they can go back to a step, and they stop trying to capture everything. Tell them it is a reference for looking things up, not a rerun to watch from the beginning.
How Quisnap helps
The habits above all work. Most of them come down to the same thing: getting what is on your screen into the hands of the people watching, so they don't have to transcribe it.
That is the idea behind Quisnap. The words on your screen arrive as words. Anyone watching can select and copy any text on your screen with one drag, live, the way they would on a web page: the command, the formula, the link, spelled exactly the way you typed it. If it's too small, they zoom in themselves without anything moving on yours. And when you stop, the same link is the replay, and they can search it for any word that was on screen.
In short
- Say what you're about to do before you do it.
- Leave things on screen long enough to be taken down.
- Hand out anything people must type exactly as text.
- Give people checkpoints with a known result.
- Show one window at a time.
- Make the screen readable before anyone asks.
- Tell people there is a replay, and that it is for looking things up.