RE: Why use screen shots at all? [WAS Survey: "Screen shots"]

[KMcLauchlan -at- chrysalis-its -dot- com]

Well, the short answer is that Customer Support 
(the after-it's-sold people) and Customer Engineering 
(the before-it's-sold people) both asked for 
screen views in docs.

People making buying decisions seem to want to see 
that kind of fluff in documents that accompany the 
product (even though they won't likely be the actual 
installers or users...).

People who are very visually oriented and skimmers 
of instructions, or people who are thrown into a 
task for which they don't feel prepared, seem to prefer 
visual aids as anchor points, and visual reassurance 
that they've "done the right things, so far".

My early stuff for this company was practically 
illustration-free. Most developers were ok with 
that. But we also have end-user customers... who were not.

/kevin

> -----Original Message-----
> From: John Cornellier [mailto:tw -at- cornellier -dot- com]
> 
> Why not get rid of the screen caps altogether? 

[snip]
 
> In online doc, most screen captures are a total waste of space.

[snip]

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