In his post, “'Digital Natives' and the end of traditional hotline support”, Ellis Pratt describes how the model of support has changed from the 1990's. In the 1990's users would seek immediate support from people who were geographically near them (usually in the same office or workspace). With the advent of social media, geography is no longer important. Users, especially younger users, are first turning to Google, Twitter, email, instant messages and other forms of social media to get answers to their support questions. These forms of communication are almost uniformly text-based. Where does traditional software documentation fit in this new process? Quoting from Ellis:

Many businesses have a Technical Publications department that is in charge of writing software documentation. Most customers never read software documentation. Those two facts are directly related.

We have been using Zendesk to manage our help tickets for quite some time now. This last week we switched over to Zendesk for our customer support forums as well. As we were going to be pointing more of our users to our Zendesk site we wanted to customize the look a bit. The main thing we wanted to do was have easy navigation between our forums and our documentation on ScreenSteps. Using jQuery this is pretty simple. You can use the technique below to add any tab you like to your Zendesk support page. The full details of how we did this can be seen in our ScreenSteps Live API manual. In this post I will just go over the javascript we used.

In our recent webinar, Video, Screencasts and Still Images - Using the Right Tool at the Right Time, we spent a brief amount of time on the concept of Scope vs. Detail in your customer interactions. What do we mean when we talk about scope vs. detail? All communications have a naturally or arbitrarily enforced time/length constraint. The communication may be limited by several factors: The time the person is willing to devote to the communication The time the person is able to devote to the communication The attention the person is able to give the communication By being aware of these constraints you can adjust the scope and detail of your communications so that each communication can be "completed" in the available amount of time depending on willingness, availability and attention span.

Today's software company, whether providing desktop or SAAS offerings, provides customer support in a number of different settings. For example, in our company we interact with our customers in five different ways:

Using a web knowledge base to answer customer questions can be a tremendous resource. They are easy to access and easy to update. Most web knowledge base articles are text based, however. Adding screen captures or other visual elements to your knowledge base articles can dramatically improve the results your knowledge base delivers. Most people think that it is just because the articles are more clear (visual information makes instructions easier to follow). But they also affect the user's decision making when they are determining whether or not to read an article. Let's look at why that is. Knowledge bases usually contain "how-to" type articles. When a user views an article in your knowledge base they need to quickly answer two questions in their mind:

This is a follow up to the post from last week about pasting adjustments in Screenflow. A tricky situation can arise if you are pasting adjustments from a clip that has a video action on it. 3 Different Pan/Zoom Settings Here we have two clips but there are actually three pan and zoom settings. There is the initial pan and zoom setting of the first clip. This consists of the x/y coordinate of the video and the zoom setting. Next we have a video action. All a video action does is allow you to set a new x/y coordinate and zoom setting for the clip. The video action then animates the transition between the original pan/zoom setting and the new pan/zoom setting to create the pan/zoom visual effect. The new clip has its own pan (x/y coordinate) and zoom setting. Let's say that we want to copy the zoom settings from clip 1 to clip 2. At the beginning of the clip (1) the zoom is set to 100%. At the end of the clip, after the video action the zoom is set to 300%. At the beginning of the 2nd clip (3) the zoom is set to 100%. What we want is to change the zoom setting of the 2nd clip (3) to 300%. The Wrong Approach Here I have placed the playhead at the end of clip 1. What I will see on the screen is a zoom of 300% because I have the playhead placed after the video action. So I might think that I am copying a zoom setting of 300%. BUT I AM NOT. The Edit > Copy command copies what is selected, not what is under the playhead. If I copy right now I will be copying a zoom setting of 100%. The Right Way Now I have the video action selected. If I select Edit > Copy I will be copying a zoom setting of 300%. Finish Now just select the 2nd clip and choose Edit > Paste Adjustments > Video and you will be applying the 300% zoom to the 2nd clip. Improve Your Customer Commnunication

Sometimes when editing in Screenflow I want to apply the zoom and pan setting of one clip to another. I just discovered an easy way of doing this. Setup Here is the situation. I have a clip that I have zoomed and panned (1). When the playline moves to the next clip (2) I want it to have the same zoom and pan settings. Select Edit > Copy With the zoomed and panned clip selected, select Edit > Copy as if you were going to copy the entire clip. Select 2nd Clip I now select the clip I want to apply the settings to (2). The clip I copied is just before it in the timeline (1), but doesn't have to be. Select Edit > Paste Adjustments Select Edit > Paste Adjustments and whatever attribute you want to apply from the clip you copied. In my case I am selecting Video. That will apply the zoom and pan settings to the new clip. As you can see you could do the same for Audio, Screen Recording and Callout settings.

Screenflow is a great screencasting application. But it doesn't offer much in the form of audio editing. In this post I will show you a simple method for editing your audio in GarageBand and bringing it back into Screenflow. A little background on this: I have been using this method for awhile with Screenflow and Garageband. Last week we wanted to get Trevor going creating some screencasts, so we purchased a Screenflow license and Trevor got started creating some videos. I whipped this lesson up in ScreenSteps to show him how to improve his audio. Setup: Before doing this you want to make sure that you have finished editing your video in Screenflow. This is the last thing you do before you publish your screencast. In this tutorial we are going to: Export our video Open it in GarageBand Edit the audio Bring it back into Screenflow Export Video Adjust Settings

Last week on Allison Sheridan's Nosillacast she did a review of Screenflow. In it she mentioned that she couldn't figure out why they have a "rotate video" option. We use Screenflow a lot and are one of the sponsors of the Nosillacast so I thought I would throw together a quick tutorial on why and how you would use the video rotation feature in Screenflow. Intro Video Setup Be sure to watch the video above so you know what we are trying to accomplish in this tutorial. To recreate the effect above you need to have first recorded your background video (in my case, a Keynote presentation).