Some people think that ScreenSteps is just about adding images to your documentation. But there is a lot more it can do. The video below highlights a few differences between the Zendesk article editor and ScreenSteps including: Applying image borders Revision management Auto-numbering of steps Annotation presets Image updating Step re-ordering

Since the goal of a how-to guide is to allow customers to help themselves, most businesses only think of documentation in terms of how it will impact their customer support. But your how-to guides and documentation can also communciate a lot about your business. Whenever I am getting ready to start using a new product or service, I instantly look at the company's help site. Granted, I develop online documentation software, so I am probably a bit more aware of this than others, but a company's help/documentation site can tell me a lot about what it will be like to work with them. Here are three things I know about you if you have a great documentation site: 1. You are organized I have never seen a disorganized company put together a great documentation site. A great documentation site sends a clear signal about how organized your company is. A great example of this is the Van Halen Brown M&M's. Van Halen used to have a rider in their contract that required the promoters to provide a bowl of M&M's with all of the brown ones removed. A lot of people thought this was just them being divas. But Snopes explains the real reason:

Do you ever get tickets in Zendesk that ask three or more questions in the same ticket? They can be a real pain to manage because you can lose track of which question is answered and which is still unresolved.

This last month we added a third person to the Blue Mango team, Jonathan (Ja) DeVore, our new Director of Marketing. You might notice some commonality among the names here. Trevor and I are brothers and have been business partners since 2003. Ja is our younger, but taller brother. He comes to Blue Mango after several years at PricewaterhouseCoopers, so he has some legit experience behind him. Ja is an incredibly creative person, but had very little experience with many of the tools that we use here. He comes from a corporate environment and is used to corporate tools. We are a small business so we use a lot of web applications to get our work done each day. The list of tools we use is getting pretty extensive, and training someone on all of them can seem overwhelming. But Ja was productive from day one. In fact, for his first three days I was in Boston on a trip with my 9 year-old. How did Ja hit the ground running? Though he's pretty smart, he's not smart enough to instantly know how to use all of the software applications we use. The key was that we had documentation that was optimized for delegation.

We get the question "Why would I purchase Clarify if I already own ScreenSteps? pretty frequently. I may not be able to answer that for *you* but I can tell you why *I* use both Clarify and ScreenSteps and why we created Clarify in the first place. Why did we create Clarify? The simple answer is that we had a need that ScreenSteps wasn't meeting. We used ScreenSteps all of the time for creating how-to's and documentation. But there were dozens of times each week when something like ScreenSteps would be perfect. But we didn't use ScreenSteps. We muddled on with text-only communications. What were these situations? It was firing off a quick how-to to a customer that only applied to them. It was filing a bug report with a software vendor. It was trying to get help with a technical problem we were having. It was trying to point out website revisions. It was trying to point out key elements of a report. In each of these situations ScreenSteps seemed too "heavy". We had to decide what to title the lessons we created. The lessons got stored into our library whether or not we wanted to keep them. And in ScreenSteps we had all of these features that made creating documentation simple but got in the way of quick, one-off communications. For awhile we tried to add these workflows into ScreenSteps. But it never worked. We never really adopted the new workflows and explaining what ScreenSteps "did" became increasingly difficult as it was trying to do too many things. We decided that we needed to create a totally new product that focused on creating speedy, one-off communications instead of creating documentation. It was take the essential parts of ScreenSteps and streamline them. That is what Clarify is. So what do I use now?

We have been talking a lot lately about the importance of providing road maps for our customers. As we looked at our own customer education material we realized that while we offered a lot of documentation tips, we didn't have a clear guide that helped our customers establish and implement a successful documentation strategy. Some customers were able to piece together a complete strategy from the articles we produced, but to do so they had to bounce around to a lot of different places.

Too many people think of software documentation as a project they will complete as opposed to a process they will establish. Software documentation projects almost always fail. They fail to meet the real needs of users. They fail to provide up-to-date information. They fail to deliver real business results. The key to creating great docs is to abandon projects and instead establish a documentation process. I explain the details of how you can accomplish this in the short video below. The tips I share in this video are what our most successful customers use to make software documentation a key part of their business strategy.

Without clear goals your software documentation is bound to fail. Recently we have started thinking of our documentation in two contexts: Documentation that provides a road map Documentation that removes roadblocks

Do you answer yes to any of these questions? Is your customer support group inundated with repetitive requests for the same information? Are your employees clamoring to find out the details of your company’s new policies? Do you need to efficiently and effectively train new clients on the use of your product? Do you need to train your employees on the technology products you use to run your business? Managing knowledge bases without an easy way for groups of people to access them can suck productivity out of your business. If your customers and employees are constantly scrambling to find the information they need you need to consider the hidden power of an online manual. Online manuals centralize all of your pertinent data for specific groups. Whether it is a customer support manual, an employee handbook, a research guide, a lesson plan, an employee hiring test or a product tutorial guide, online manuals can solve your problems of distributing information to a large or small audience. Compare this to what a lot of organizations are doing - locking their knowledge in PDF and Word files. Capturing your organization's knowledge in these formats makes that knowledge hard to access and hard to update.

We have all experienced the frustration of wading through wordy, unclear documentation, just trying to find the information we needed. For some reason some authors believe that we need to know the life history of an application before we are allowed to do anything with it. We created this video to show what life would be like if GPS units treated us the same way. Enjoy!