MindTouch:
Clearer Documentation With ScreenSteps Workgroup
“We’re in the process of redoing many of our user guides to make them much more visual and we are using ScreenSteps for all of it. ScreenSteps really speeds up the writing process and improves the clarity of what we are writing.”
Kelly Abbott is the VP of Product Development for MindTouch, one of world’s most respected social knowledge bases. MindTouch is used by organizations such as Autodesk, HTC, and Microsoft. Millions of people use their software every day.
MindTouch and ScreenSteps have been partners for several years now. But MindTouch also uses ScreenSteps to create their own documentation. We recently interviewed Kelly to learn how MindTouch uses ScreenSteps internally to support their customers and create clearer documentation.
How did you discover ScreenSteps?
I got introduced to it once I joined MindTouch. I was a big user of screen capture utilities, but before joining MindTouch I had never used ScreenSteps. You don’t have to go very far in the MindTouch organization to hear about ScreenSteps.
How is MindTouch Using ScreenSteps?
MindTouch uses ScreenSteps in two ways:
1. To respond clearly and quickly to our customer questions.
2. To author our documentation articles.
Our support staff uses ScreenSteps to point out things directly to users. We do a lot of email support. A user might have a problem just because they aren’t familiar with MindTouch yet. Corey Ganser (Customer Support Manager at MindTouch) will create a document in ScreenSteps that goes through a particular use case, throw it up on our developers’ site where our documentation is and then point the user to that page.
So he is responding to customers and creating documentation at the same time. He does this on a daily basis. When someone comes to him with a similar question in the future he can just point them back to the document he already created.
What is the main benefit of ScreenSteps to the authors at MindTouch?
Two things:
1. We are able to communicate more clearly in less time with our users.
2. As an authoring team we are able to be more efficient.
How does ScreenSteps help you communicate more clearly with your customers?
It’s very difficult in software to tell a person an action to take. You have to tell a person in words how to orient themselves on the page. With a picture you just add an arrow and that’s it. You orient them. There is no confusion.
With ScreenSteps I can quickly document an idea with pictures that gets me 90% of the story. It may need some modifications, but in a support case I can quickly get something to an end user and then they can help me, through MindTouch, modify it until it is perfect. The pictures clarify the communication which helps my users understand what I am communicating.
How does ScreenSteps help your team work more efficiently?
Because we are a collaborative environment we really enjoy the Workgroup setup. With ScreenSteps Workgroup all of our lessons are stored in a central location. Now Corey, Cathy (who is also doing a lot of writing for us) and I can all share the same ScreenSteps library to do our modifications and publish to MindTouch. Collaboratively it is working really well with MindTouch. So that helps us work better as a team.
But it also helps us individually. On a single page I can save 3 or 4 hours by using ScreenSteps. If I were using a different screen capture application I would have to capture the image, resize it, upload it to the MindTouch page and then if I didn’t like the way it looked I would have to do the whole thing again. With ScreenSteps I just edit the screenshot, repost and everything gets updated on my MindTouch page. It’s a much better workflow.
How has ScreenSteps changed the way you write documentation at MindTouch?
I’ve always known I should use more pictures but ScreenSteps makes it so easy that I actually do it. Before it was like, “I know I want a picture there but it is going to take a long time to do that so I will just describe it in words.” And you can tell. A lot of our old documentation at MindTouch is really verbose. That was just the way we were accustomed to doing it.
Now, when you look at the new documentation it has a completely different vibe because it is so oriented around the picture, so oriented around showing the user instead of just telling them. We’re in the process of redoing many of our user guides to make them much more visual and we are using ScreenSteps for all of it. ScreenSteps really speeds up the writing process and improves the clarity of what we are writing.
Take Aways
- MindTouch adds images and screenshots to add more clarity to their documentation
- MindTouch creates documentation regularly in response to customer questions
- By using ScreenSteps to author their documentation they can publish documentation to their MindTouch site in fraction of the time it would take to use traditional screen capture tools
- MindTouch uses ScreenSteps Workgroup to simplify the collaboration process among their documentation authors