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disclaimer for small UI diffs in screenshots (of SaaS products) ?
Subject:disclaimer for small UI diffs in screenshots (of SaaS products) ? From:"Monique Semp" <monique -dot- semp -at- earthlink -dot- net> To:"TechWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:50:59 -0800
Hello, TechWR-L-ers,
So when youâre documenting a SaaS product where the programmers make frequent but often inconsequential or easily followed or very obvious changes to the UI, have you ever just written a disclaimer to the effect that
âBecause this is a SaaS application that weâre continually improving, you may notice slight differences between the screenshots in this document and the displays that you actually see. But rest assured that the documented operations and procedures are still applicable, and that weâll update the documentation for any substantive functional changes.â
Iâm thinking that the para is ok, with the exception being that many readers wonât know what I mean by âSaas,â but I used it here for shorthand just for this discussion. In the doc Iâll reword or explain ahead what SaaS is.
Thoughts and/or recommendations, especially those based on your experience?
(These are really minor changes, such as changing a tabâs label from âNewsâ to âNews & Infoâ, and everything else remains the same.)
Now I expect that a useful discussion around this issue would be that perhaps these screenshots arenât really needed if the diffs donât even matter, and basically I agree. But my directive is very clear for this project: the client wants these screenshots, and lots of them, so that users can follow along just by looking at the screenshots in the doc (even if they canât read the text, which definitely happens since we havenât localized the docs and the docs go to non-English-speaking users). And this is legitimate in my mind, and so Iâve got tons of screenshots.
But they donât have a very formal UI/UX process, so the interface changes much more frequently than I could ever hope to keep up with in the docs, and it really is a pointless use of Tech Pubs hours to even try to keep up. And the client is fine with these slight disconnects between reality and docs (and I am too).
Looking forward to the discussion,
-Monique
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