A Little Help Please
Over the last few weeks we have been shifting the primary focus of ScreenSteps Live to manuals. In doing so we have been looking at ways to easily integrate the manuals you create into a variety of different applications.
One feature we recently added was the ability to fetch a list of manual lessons that has been filtered by tags. For example, if I have a manual for my web application I can tag all of the lessons that discuss managing users with "user management". I could then add some javascript (supplied by ScreenSteps Live) to my user management screens that displays all lessons from my manual tagged with "user management". As I continue to add lessons and make updates based on user feedback those lessons pertaining to "user management" would automatically show up in my web application.
This last week we have been experimenting with using these filtered lesson lists in our ScreenSteps desktop application. As we've looked at user feedback we have realized that we really need to improve the experience a user has when first exposed to ScreenSteps. With that in mind I fired up Revolution (the development environment we build ScreenSteps with) and was able to quickly mock up a welcome screen that had four categories: Getting Started, Sharing, More Tutorials and Useful Links. Next I headed over to http://bmls.screenstepslive.com and started tagging lessons from our manual with "getting started", "sharing" and "more". "Useful Links" is hard coded with urls to various resources so it doesn't display any lessons. Here is what I came up with as a first pass:
When the welcome window is opened the list of lessons under the three categories is refreshed with the latest content from our ScreenSteps Live manual (slightly different content is displayed if you don't have an internet connection). ScreenSteps Live provides the list of lessons in XML which I parse and display. Clicking on any of the lessons takes the user to our ScreenSteps Live site where they can view the lesson within the context of the manual and provide feedback through the user comments feature.
The cool part is that if we find that many users are having the same issues when they first start using ScreenSteps we can modify the Getting Started lessons accordingly and that new content is displayed the next time the welcome window is opened. Or if we release a new feature that we want to point out to users we can add a lesson under "More Tutorials" explaining how to use it. All of the management is done through a single documentation resource - ScreenSteps Live.
Our philosophy is that your documentation is rarely ever finished. You are continually updating and improving the documentation as users ask questions and you uncover better ways of teaching concepts. Ideally you can then deliver these lessons to the user in the context where it will prove the most useful. By creating a seamless link between ScreenSteps Desktop -> ScreenSteps Live -> Web/Desktop Application we hope to make this type of documentation more prevalent. We will see how it goes.
June 2nd, 2008 at 9:18 am
[...] also see a new Welcome Center window when you first launch ScreenSteps. In our company blog you can read about how we are using some new features of ScreenSteps Live to do [...]