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

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We just launched an update to ScreenSteps Live that allows you to easily add contextual help to your web application using ScreenSteps and ScreenSteps Live. What do we mean by that? Well, now you can get a little javascript from ScreenSteps Live that points to lessons with a specific tag in your online manual. So, for example if you had a screen on in your web app called “Administration”, you could tag all of the lessons that applied to that screen with “Administration Screen”. Then copy the javascript from ScreenSteps Live, insert it into your Administration screen on your web app and you have instant contextual help. What is cool is that if you ever post a new lesson with the “Administration Screen” tag it will automatically show up in the contextual help.

Check out the video below to see how this works.

Update 5/07/2008: Added screencast showing blog uploading.

Download URLS for 2.1 Beta:

Download Beta 2.1 for Windows

Download Beta 2.1 for Mac

We just wanted to announce that ScreenSteps 2.1 public beta is available. A couple of big changes in this one.

Post to WordPress, TypePad or Movable Type

First, the most exciting news. You can now publish directly to your own WordPress, TypePad or Movable Type blog using ScreenSteps. You no longer need to have a ScreenSteps Live account to publish to your blog. We think that this is very cool and so have our initial testers, so download the beta and try it out for yourself.

Here is a video showing off the feature:

Topics are now Manuals

The naming of Topics in the UI has been changed to Manuals. This is essentially what Topics are and we think that it will make the whole concept of how to use ScreenSteps much clearer. Why didn’t we call them Manuals from the start? At the time we had good reasons. They don’t seem as good now.

Download the Public Beta

There are a lot of other fixes in the release notes in case you are interested.

Download the public beta and let us know what you think:

Download Beta 2.1 for Windows

Download Beta 2.1 for Mac

You can see a lesson about how to configure the blog settings here.

Sometimes it seems like documentation authors believe they are getting paid by the word. You should focus on writing as little documentation as possible. With every word you add to you documentation you decrease the likelihood that someone will read it. Repeat this over and over to yourself as you write your documentation and the quality of your output will improve dramatically.

We personally believe that, in many cases, it is better to have less detailed documentation that is not technically “complete”. What do we mean by that? There may be something you are documenting that has one caveat that affects 1% of your users, another that affects 2%, etc. If you put all of those caveats in your documentation you create a cluttered mess.

You have therefore made you documentation useless for everyone.

What is the point in that? Write your documentation for 90% of your user base. Then create a separate section for those niche cases, a section that the 90% never need to see.

The next time you are writing a lesson or tutorial, try this technique. Pull out all of the caveats. Focus on making the documentation clear for the majority of your users. Your documentation will be easier to write and easier to read and will actually become useful.

Just wanted to let you know that we deployed the updates to ScreenSteps Live this morning. This includes the change from “topics” to “manuals” mentioned in the previous post as well as:

• New index page for Manuals
• The ability to add text along the side of each manual page where you can link to other downloads, websites, etc.
• A new template called “Live”. Check out our ScreenSteps live site (bmls.screenstepslive.com) to see it. I think you’ll like it.
• The ability to respond to comments on a lesson right inside the “Edit Lesson” view.
• Lots of additional bug fixes.

We will be updating the ScreenSteps Live documents on Monday, but if you get a chance, tell us what you think of the new layout.

 

We wanted to notify all of our users of a few changes that are coming to ScreenSteps Live. These changes will primarily affect paid account holders.

This weekend we will be changing the name of “Topics” to “Manuals”. Some of our users were confused about what Topics really were and how they should organize their content. We think that a simple rename will make this much clearer. Don’t worry if you have sent urls out that look like http://bmls.screenstepslive.com/topics/1. Those will redirect tohttp://bmls.screenstepslive.com/manuals/1 after the update so none of your links will be broken.

In addition, we are changing the look a little bit for the new “Manuals”. You can now add a message to the left of each manual where you can include links to your mains site or other relevant information. We plan to add some additional options to this “Manuals Sidebar” in the near future, so stay tuned.

We have also added two new options, “Require Login for All Users” and “Permalinks for Manuals”.

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This is the new ScreenSteps Blog. We will be posting announcements regarding ScreenSteps and ScreenSteps Live, tips for using both of them both, and general ideas on teaching and documentation. We hope you find it useful.