Instant Publishing for ScreenSteps Lessons

How Do We Use ScreenSteps Live?

There are a lot of possible users for ScreenSteps Live but the ones we can talk about best are the ones we use. They are:

• Customer Support
• Product Documentation

Customer Support

We try to write good software and provide clear documentation. But customers still have questions. ScreenSteps Live makes answering them almost effortless. And each time we answer a question with a ScreenSteps lesson we never have to answer it again.

Here is how it used to be:

• We would get an email requesting help with something.
• We would respond with an email. Sometimes that would fix the customer's problem and sometimes it wouldn't. Most of the time we would have to follow up with additional emails to help the customer understand how to resolve their issue. The issue hadn't changed. They just didn't understand our instructions.
• Another customer might have the same question. We would start the whole process again. If we got enough of the same questions we would add it to our FAQ.

This all took a lot of time. Here is what we do now:

• We get an email where a customer has a questions.
• If we already have a lesson posted on ScreenSteps Live that would solve their issue we email them a link. If we don't then we create one. It usually takes between 5 to 10 minutes to create the lesson and post it to ScreenSteps Live.

That's it. We don't have endless follow-ups or misunderstandings. The customer knows exactly what we are trying to show them. If we haven't understood their question they know it right away. The best part is that our online manual grows each time that we respond to a request which makes it easier to help customers in the future.

Product Documentation

We aren't even going to talk about doing documentation without ScreenSteps Desktop. We don't ever want to go back to those days. But what about doing documentation with ScreenSteps Desktop but without ScreenSteps Live? Here is how we used to do it.

• We created an HTML template in ScreenSteps for our online documentation.
• We created a bunch of ScreenSteps lessons and exported them using that HTML template.
• We would then FTP the files up to our server.
• We only updated them if we really had to.

Basically we found that we had made the documentation creation process much better by creating ScreenSteps but there were still bottlenecks on the updating side.

Here is how we do it now:

• Initially we just create lessons as we need them and post them to ScreenSteps Live. They aren't public so we can test the content internally first.
• We then begin to organize lessons into topics on ScreenSteps Live.
• As we get closer to release we see where the gaps are and create lessons to fill them. It is really easy to divide the work up between people because the manual is being assembled online.
• Updating isn't a big deal either. We update the lesson in ScreenSteps and hit "Publish". The lesson is automatically updated on ScreenSteps Live. Any one of us can update any of the lessons as well since we post each lesson as a package. So if Trevor created a lesson that I need to udpate I just download the package (which has all of the original material for the lesson), edit it in ScreenSteps and republish it to ScreenSteps Live.

Another great benefit is that our manual is no longer a one way means of communication. Our users can add comments to our lessons which helps us know if there are inaccuracies or things that aren't clear. With ScreenSteps Live we update our manual all of the time.

The added benefit of this is that creating the lessons while we are developing is the best bug testing method we have ever found. We find all sorts of bugs while we are creating documentation which really helps improve our product.

How Will You Use It?

That's how we use it. How will you? Sign-up for a free account to just try posting to ScreenSteps Live. Or sign-up for a 30-day trial for one of our paid accounts and see what a difference ScreenSteps Live can make for you.

Pricing and Sign-up

You are welcome to try out ScreenSteps Live with a free account. Paid plans start at $12/month. You can get started by clicking below.

Sign-up & Pricing