A few months ago we launched a survey to see what kind of impact ScreenSteps was having in the businesses and organizations that use it. We were interested in answering a few questions:
Well, here are the results and I have to say, we're quite proud of them.
Since starting to use ScreenSteps we create more help articles: 75% agree or strongly agree.
Since starting to use ScreenSteps we use many more images in our documentation: 76% agree or strongly agree.
Images are so important to great documentation. I have to say that when we first created ScreenSteps our primary goal was to get people to use more images in their documentation because it could make such a huge impact on the clarity of the documentation. So I was really happy with this number.
Since starting to use ScreenSteps the quality of our documents has improved: 89% agree or strongly agree
Wow! Almost 90%. At first we thought this number would track closer to the increase in images but it is quite a bit higher. I think this is because ScreenSteps forces you to write in a very logical, step-by-step fashion. Too many help authoring tools or wikis give you a blank canvas. This can make it hard to keep your articles clear and concise. It seems that ScreenSteps is helping businesses create better, more effective documentation regardless of whether they are including more images or not.
Since starting to use ScreenSteps the organization of our documents has improved: 79% agree or strongly agree
We also wanted to make it easier to keep documentation organized. I always hated coming to a documentation site that just had a huge collection of articles that weren't organized at all.
Since starting to use ScreenSteps it takes us much less time to author and publish a help article: 73% agree or strongly agree
I really think this is important. The less time it takes you to write an article the more articles you will create. And that means that you starting documenting areas of your product or business that you wouldn't document before because it wasn't worth the hassle.
There was a follow up question to this - How much time on average does ScreenSteps save you per article. Over 55% said that ScreenSteps saves them on average between 1 hour and several days per article. That is a huge productivity boost. Many of our customers have hundreds or even thousands of articles. Think of that 1+ hours multiplied over hundreds of articles - that is a lot of hours every year.
By far the most important question was: ScreenSteps has helped us improve our business organization - 80% agree or strongly agree.
Does this mean that we have done all that we need to do? Not even close. I am sure that if we asked questions like, "Would you like article authoring to be faster?", or "Do you wish your ScreenSteps knowledge base was more organized?", we would get resounding number of yeses. This survey doesn't tell us that we have arrived where we want to be, but it does tell us that we are headed in the right direction.
We hope that if you are a current ScreenSteps customer that you are seeing these types of results. And if you aren't yet, get in touch with us. We would love to help you out.