Your company has decided to use ScreenSteps for its knowledge base, which means your team of content authors will need to learn new software.
Everyone is accustomed to writing your procedures in Word docs, PDFs, or Excel sheets. But you believe the change will be worth it.
A new opportunity like ScreenSteps is exciting! There’s a lot of promise about things getting better. Once everyone is trained on ScreenSteps, you’ll be able to write content faster and make changes quicker.
Despite your enthusiasm to adopt ScreenSteps in your company, you may be still hesitant because you’re not sure how to train your authoring team.
When I approach projects, I like to have a plan of attack. I’ve helped dozens of companies implement ScreenSteps as the Customer Care Advocate.
Whether you have an authoring team of 2-5 people or 50 or more, you’ll simplify the training process as you train your authoring team on ScreenSteps by following these four steps.
1. Break down and assign the roles and responsibilities
Whenever you start with new software, there is a learning curve. To lessen the load of learning a new system, it helps to break up responsibilities. That way, your employees can become an expert in an area quicker. Then they can continue to learn the rest of the system.
You’ll want to break down the different roles. Once you’ve explained the different responsibilities for each of these roles, you’ll want to assign members of your authoring team to oversee these tasks.
To get started, you’ll need at least these three roles covered: Account Administrator, Knowledge Champion (Content Manager), and Content Authors.
Note: If you are a smaller team of content authors (2-3 people), you may not assign roles. Instead, you could distribute your responsibilities amongst your team. The important part is to make sure these assignments are covered.
I. Account Administrator
The Account Administrator is the gatekeeper for your ScreenSteps account. This person is in charge of managing permissions. They decide who should see what and grant access so that members of your authoring team can complete their assignments.
Part of this role is coordinating and setting up single sign-on. It is the Account Administrator’s job to make sure this is set up for new employees so they can have easy access to your account.
Besides granting access to authors, this role is in charge of your ScreenSteps homepage.
Upfront when setting up your ScreenSteps homepage, it will take more time. You need to determine how you want your homepage laid out (ie: what content do you want easy access to from home, how do you want to personalize it, should you include your logo, etc). The initial homepage setup takes about 3-5 hours.
Overall, this is not a time-demanding role. It requires approximately 1-2 hours per week of management. It should be someone who is in a higher-level systems management role.
Qualities and skills to look for in your Account Administrator
Your Account Administrator should be somewhat technical.
You’ll want someone good at communicating with groups. They will need to coordinate with different departments and groups to know who is accessing ScreenSteps.
II. Knowledge Champion (Content Manager)
This is your team captain. This is the point person for managing all of the content in ScreenSteps. Your Knowledge Champion is in charge of the overall health of your ScreenSteps site. The Knowledge Champion keeps the wheel turning in your system.
This person oversees the overall organization of the site and learning materials. They’ll assign content authors writing assignments or departments/groups of articles they are responsible for.
A Knowledge Champion regularly reviews reports to see how employees are using ScreenSteps. Who is looking at the articles? How often are specific articles being viewed? Then they make plans to improve the content and fill in the gaps of any content that might be missing.
Another responsibility is reviewing comments and feedback from end-users. In ScreenSteps, end-users can leave comments on articles. They could leave a note saying something is unclear or a step is missing in a process. The Knowledge Champion either updates the articles themselves or assigns them to a content author.
We recommend that the Knowledge Champion role is a full-time position. This person should solely be dedicated to maintaining the documentation on your ScreenSteps site. However, smaller companies can get away with someone spending a minimum of 20 hours per week on this role.
Qualities and skills to look for in your Knowledge Champion
Look for someone good with stepping back and seeing the big picture. They will serve as quality control of your knowledge base.
This person should be observant and good at gaining actionable insights from analytics. They can recognize the gaps and opportunities. Then they put these ideas into action.
It helps to have good communication and coordination skills. The Knowledge Champion will work with all department experts to interview and write content for the knowledge base. You’ll want someone who is thorough in getting the procedure right since these guides will help every employee in your organization.
As a leader over a writing team, they should have strong writing and editing abilities. The Knowledge Champion will proofread the content authors’ articles.
It is helpful if they have some design instincts, but not necessary. The design background is more to help in formatting the articles so that they are clear and easy to understand.
III. Content authors
If there is no content in your knowledge base, it is useless. Your team of content authors is vital in keeping your knowledge base stocked with the help guides employees need to do their jobs.
Ideally, you’ll have 2-3 main authors. Of course, you can have more or fewer authors depending on the size of your company.
When you launch ScreenSteps, your content authors will work with your Knowledge Champion to migrate existing content into ScreenSteps.
Your content authors write the help guides, articles, checklists, and other resources in your knowledge base.
They also make updates to your existing content and optimize your articles for clear directions. This can mean adding additional steps when a process changes or taking end-user feedback to make steps clearer so that there are fewer mistakes.
Content authors typically spend about 20 hours of their week in ScreenSteps creating content. Of course, this depends on how large your company is and how many procedures they will need to oversee.
Qualities and skills to look for in your content authors
Writing is the majority of a content author’s job, so they need clear, concise writing skills. You also need to trust them to make changes in your system.
It helps if they are comfortable with technology. Your content authors don’t need to be tech wizards. We’ve designed ScreenSteps to be intuitive. However, if they struggle with following basic instructions or finding where to click on a site, you probably shouldn’t assign that employee as a content author.
2. Focus training on the specific role assignments
Don’t overwhelm your team with information. Only teach your team the specific steps they need for their roles.
The main tasks you will need to teach these roles include these four content creation assignments.
Note: See step 4 for how to train on these specific assignments.
I. Create content from scratch
Learning to create content from scratch is probably the highest learning curve. However, we provide help guides so that your employees have step-by-step instructions on how to start and create articles.
There are three main areas of content your authors will create: manuals, chapters, and articles.
You’ll need to train them on how to use the authoring tools. There are text blocks, integrated screenshots, foldable sections, arrows, and more.
You’ll also want to train them on your company’s specific style guide. When do you bold copy? Where do you use images or videos?
🔎 Related: Too Busy to Write ScreenSteps Content? Start With These 3 Articles
II. Migrate content from existing materials
Migrating content into ScreenSteps isn’t hard, but it is time-consuming.
There are two ways to migrate your content into ScreenSteps: upload your Docx files or copy and paste from your documents.
Later, you’ll want to go back and optimize this content. The important thing is to get started.
III. Make updates to existing content
This is where optimizing your content comes in. It is a continuous circle — you should always be improving your content or else it could easily fall out of date.
Editing your existing content is fairly straightforward. It works like most online documentation systems.
In your desktop editor, you’ll click “edit.” Then you’ll change the text, swap out an image, or add clarifiers like arrows. When you are finished you click “publish.” Those edits are immediately available for employees throughout the company. The older version is hidden from search, but you can revert to older versions.
IV. Make comments/suggestions to article content
This is something you’ll want to train your entire company on. Anyone is able to make comments in the published view of an article.
That means frontline workers who are referencing the articles can leave a suggestion if they get confused while going through a guide. Or if a process changes, they may notice a step is missing while completing a task. They just leave a note on the article page.
Your content authors can use the Admin area to leave comments. This allows for you to leave feedback on the article drafts and discuss the articles on the back end.
3. Create help guides in ScreenSteps for authoring
In addition to the training resources we provide, you can also create your own resources in ScreenSteps.
It’s almost like ScreenSteps inception. You are using ScreenSteps to teach your employees how to use ScreenSteps.
That way, your employees get to see ScreenSteps in action. They will see how clear guides help them accurately complete their content creation tasks. Then they can apply that as they create help guides for the rest of your company.
While our team can provide interactive guides on the basics, like How to add a user to ScreenSteps, you can provide guides that are specific to your company.
Your guides could include a checklist to make sure your content authors followed your company style guide. Did they include a screenshot with the appropriate dimensions? Did they use foldable sections to include additional details?
4. Use ScreenSteps learning resources
When you decide to use ScreenSteps, you are not alone in teaching your team how to use the authoring tools. We have curated resources to help your team learn how to create content in ScreenSteps.
ScreenSteps Manual
Just like you will create help guides for your employees, we provide articles to help you author articles in ScreenSteps.
The ScreenSteps manual is meant to provide you with an overview of how to get started with ScreenSteps.
The manual is broken down into sections and articles at help.screensteps.com. It covers a wide range of topics, including:
- Overview of authoring
- Writing articles
- Working with images
- Working with annotations
- Article management
- Working with a team of authors
- Workflow articles
- Troubleshooting
There are also step-by-step instructions to walk your employees through creating articles, such as this one on how to create an article on your desktop.
Courses
Introduce your team to the basics of ScreenSteps with courses. At help.screensteps.com, there are a variety of short courses to teach specific skills for authoring.
For example, learn how to add different elements of an article such as text boxes, screenshots, and arrows.
Technical support
Our technical support team is available to answer questions.
If you still have questions, you can always message us on our website chat or by emailing our support team. During regular business hours, our support team aims to respond to support tickets within one hour.
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Empower your authoring team with the help of a coach
Training your authoring team on new software isn’t a walk in the park. But when you break the training process into these four steps, it becomes manageable.
Your team doesn’t have to know how to do everything with authoring all at one. Provide them with the resources they need to get started and they will continue to expound on their knowledge as they use the help guides to complete articles.
ScreenSteps’ software was designed with the intent of simplifying writing, storing, and sharing documentation for companies. One of our clients was able to speed up the content creation process significantly with ScreenSteps. They can now create 4X the documents in ¼ of time.
Still unsure about training your team on authoring?
While we offer all our customers an onboarding appointment and resources to get started, we offer additional coaching services to help your team get comfortable and develop expertise. Learn more about coaching services to help get your authoring team started.
