We wanted to give you a preview of what is coming in the new ScreenSteps Employee Training Platform. Look for future blog post that will detail all of the features. But here are a few bits. Checklists Job aids are great for when an employee is still learning where to click and what to do. But after awhile, employees may not need to reference the screenshots very often because they remember all (or at least most) of the clicks for performing a task. Yet mistakes are still being made in the day-to-day operations. Billing information is incomplete, Opportunties are inaccurate, and Quotes are being sent out prematurely. Even though employees basically know how to do their job, sometimes they forget all that needs to be done. And that's where checklists come in.

Are some of your ScreenSteps articles kind of lengthy?

I have what we like to call our $40,000 fridge problem. Whoever designed our kitchen (long before we purchased our current house) put the oven so close to the wall that you can only fit a small fridge next to it. The oven is situated such that in order to get a larger fridge we would have to redo the entire kitchen.

We are happy to announce that starting on Thursday, August 31, 2017 you will now be able to set article viewing permissions on a per article basis.

Don’t you hate it when you finish up a project, release it to the world, and then get an email from your team with something like, “Hey! How come you didn’t address any of my notes and feedback?”

If you are building a knowledge base for customer support or for internal training, then it is important to keep in mind what you want the article to accomplish. In a perfect world you could write one article and use it for training, onboarding and support. And this is the approach that many people take. But it is a big mistake. When someone needs to be trained, their needs are very different from when she need to be reminded. The person who is being trained needs to understand concepts, definitions and workflows. The person who just needs a quick reminder only needs a quick step-by-step guide.

Oh, the all powerful PowerPoint Deck. PowerPoint is a part of almost every training event you will deliver or participate in. Whether it be live, a webinar or an e-learning module PowerPoint will probably be involved in some part of the process.

About a year ago, we started grappling with the problem of long articles. Sometimes, a short article just wouldn't cut it--you need a lengthy onboarding guide or a long procedure that has a lot of content. The question became, "how can one best present lengthy content to the end user?" Because if articles are too long, they force the reader to endlessly scroll down the page. All of that scrolling can be confusing, and readers can quickly lose track of what they are even looking at. So we wanted to fix that. One option was to split the article up into multiple articles in a manual. This approach would let a reader finish an article, and then hit next. The problem we saw was that, often times, readers would either land in the middle of a lengthy process (from searching a keyword the knowledge base and clicking on an article), or they would get lost somewhere in the process and lose track of where they were.

It's a small thing. But after I was told that one of my help articles looked sloppy, I realized that consistent screenshot width throughout a help article is important.

A step by step guide that gives your customers a clear path to success can really boost your customer onboarding and success efforts. Here are a few tips for providing that clear path.