Updates to ScreenSteps Live: The Direction ScreenSteps Live is Moving In

Over the weekend we posted some updates to ScreenSteps Live. This is the start to a slightly different direction for ScreenSteps Live so we wanted to let you know what we have been doing and where we are going.

When ScreenSteps Live was originally launched it was really just a place to post ScreenSteps lessons. It was somewhat like a blog for ScreenSteps lessons.

The problem we found for our customers, and for ourselves, was that we didn’t want to have yet “another” blog for tutorials. So we really didn’t end up using ScreenSteps Live that way. ScreenSteps Live for us, and for many of our customers, became a place to support users by creating online manuals. But not a place to just occasionally post lessons.

We could see this in our customer usage. Our customers that were using ScreenSteps Live as a customer support tool were posting a lot of lessons and posting very regularly. Those who were just using it as a kind of blog only posted occasionally.

With this realization we have made a few changes to ScreenSteps Live. I don’t want to say that we are relaunching ScreenSteps Live but we are definitely heading in a slightly different direction.

Quick List of Changes

Here is a quick list of the changes launched this weekend:

1. No more front page lessons - There are no longer lessons available at the main screenstepslive.com site. If users want to see your lessons then they must specifically go to your account. For example, ours is bmls.screenstepslive.com.
2. Embed full manuals into your website - You can now embed the table of contents for a complete manual into your own website or web app. Just copy some javascript code and insert it into your web page. The table of contents will appear on your own web page and will update each time you change your manual on ScreenSteps Live. This gives you the benefit of the ease of use of ScreenSteps Live while still having the manual table of contents appear on your site. Once the user clicks on a link in your manual they will be taken to the lesson on ScreenSteps Live. Here is a lesson on how to do it: Embedding Manuals.
3. Updated Plans - The available plans have changed slightly. The main change has come to the free plan. Before the free plan was just a place to post ScreenSteps Live lessons. If that is all you want to do then we really suggest that you use ScreenSteps 2.1 with a blog service such as WordPress or TypePad. The new free plan is really a chance for you to try out the features available on ScreenSteps Live for customer support.

If you already have a free plan nothing will change for you. You still have the same plan that you had before. The updated free plans only affect new users of ScreenSteps Live.

A More Detailed Look At The Changes and Where ScreenSteps Live is Going

First off, for those of you who want to post ScreenSteps lessons to your blog we are building this functionality right into ScreenSteps. In the 2.1 beta you can currently post directly to WordPress, TypePad and MovableType blogs. We plan to add additional options as we are able to. In fact, if you have a specific Wiki, CMS, or blogging system you would like to post ScreenSteps lessons to, let us know and we will see what we can do to help you out.

So how does ScreenSteps Live fit into all of this? If you can post your lessons to your blog/wiki/etc. why would you need ScreenSteps Live? Well, certain of you won’t. But we think there are quite a few of you that will find ScreenSteps Live very useful.

ScreenSteps Live is really a customer support tool, whether those customers are inside or outside of your organization. We have some basic beliefs about how documentation should fit into the customer support process that are a little different than what people are used to. ScreenSteps Live is being built around those ideas:

1. Your Documentation is Never Done

Most documentation systems focus on helping you produce a “finished” product. ScreenSteps and ScreenSteps Live are specifically designed to help produce an unfinished product. The idea is that you should be able to post some lessons during your alpha or beta stage, update them as you move to release, and gradually fill in the gaps in your documentation as you need to. You don’t ever think of finishing the documentation. You just gradually add to it as you need to.

ScreenSteps Live makes it so easy to post, update and organize lessons that we really don’t think there is a better tool out there for this type of documentation process.

2. Your Documentation Needs to Be a Conversation, Not a Lecture

Most documentation is released as a one-way conversation. The author never knows if the user understands the information and the user doesn’t have an efficient means of asking for clarification on a subject.

We think this stinks and really decreases the usefulness of documentation as a customer support tool. You need to provide an easy way for you and your customer to have a conversation through your documentation. The initial iteration of this on ScreenSteps Live is through the use of comments on each lesson. In the upcoming weeks and months we will be releasing some features that will make this conversation even easier.

3. You Need to Have Your Documentation Where and When Your Customers Need It

This isn’t actually much different than what most people think. Everyone believes that you should have context sensitive help and documentation. But how do you efficiently do that with documentation that isn’t ever really finished? (see point 1 above)

That is where a lot of the real power of ScreenSteps Live comes in. Our first steps in this area has been adding the ability to embed tagged lessons and complete manuals into your website. In the upcoming weeks and months we will be adding more functionality along these lines. In fact, when 2.1 officially launches you will see how we will be embedding contextual help into our desktop application using ScreenSteps Live.

Moving Forward

What we are really trying to do with ScreenSteps Live and ScreenSteps is build a product around documentation/customer support philosophy. Like we have said before, we believe that software documentation is broken and we are trying to fix it. We think with the current release of ScreenSteps Live and and the upcoming release of ScreenSteps 2.1 we are getting a lot closer to reaching that goal.

Tags: Documentation

This entry was posted on Monday, May 19th, 2008 at 5:23 am and is filed under ScreenSteps Desktop, ScreenSteps Live, Updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.