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?
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.
