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!

If you have been following our blog you may have seen a few of our announcements regarding Clarify Clarify is a new product we have been working on for several months designed to help you communicate more clearly online. As people have been introduced to Clarify several questions have come up. Here are some answers to the most common ones. Why did you create Clarify? Isn't this the same as ScreenSteps? At first glance Clarify may seem very similar to ScreenSteps but it has some important differences. The idea for Clarify was born when we introduced our ScreenSteps.me service for sharing ScreenSteps documents online. Prior to that, ScreenSteps had always been a software documentation tool. But with the simplicity of ScreenSteps.me we began to use ScreenSteps to create one-off communications with our customers. This wasn't really software documentation. It was just communication. But it worked really well - except for one thing.

I have written before on this blog about how much we love Wistia. To me, Wistia is to business video publishing what ScreenSteps is to online documentation. Just like ScreenSteps takes the headache out of creating documentation, Wistia removes all of the headaches associated with publishing and distributing online video. You don't have to encode the video in 500 different formats. You don't have an ugly YouTube player with ads on it. You don't have to worry about what device your audience is viewing the video on. You just upload the video and Wistia takes care of the rest. Wistia just posted a video showcasing all of the pain they can remove from online video. It's called "Why Web Video Sucks". When I watched it yesterday I cracked up laughing. Check it out below:

A question was recently posted on Twitter, "@donmcallister @podfeet opinions on what problems are best solved by/use cases for Mac apps such as ScreenSteps, Screenflow, Skitch, others?" We get that question a lot. We answered it in depth in a webinar we did last year titled "Video, Screencasts and Still Images - Using the Right Tool at the Right Time." But for those who are interested in a shorter answer, here it is. These are some simple rules that we use.

I read two articles recently. One article highlighted the technical communication work of a six-year-old while the other was by a professional journalist for a major online publication. One example communicated information clearly and concisely. The other talked in abstractions. Can you guess which was which? Anne Gentle of Just Write Click showcased some technical communication work from her friend's 6-year-old daughter. The aspiring instructional designer created a step-by-step guide showing how to create a Play-Doh apatosaurus. When you look at the results you might notice something - there are no words, just pictures.

Last month I purchased GarageBand for my iPad. I used to be pretty involved in the music industry, so I was really interested to see how Apple had translated a music sequencer into an iPad application. The result is really amazing and I had a blast assembling drum tracks, bending guitar strings and playing B3 organs. But then I gave it to my 7-year old. In about 15 minutes he had created a song. It had a drum track and some rock guitar and it sounded pretty good. In fact, in his mind it was amazing. He instantly wanted to send it out to grandparents, aunts and uncles and would play it for anyone who would listen. He had discovered the joy of creating music. Why do I tell you this story? Because often in the software world we get caught up with "feature lists." Feature lists make it so easy for us to compare our software against our competition. But feature lists don't ensure outcomes.