FW: When to use screen shots (was: screen dumps in books)

[Carl Stieren <carls -at- CYBERUS -dot- CA>]

When do I use screen shots? As sparingly as possible. I get much more
documentation usability - and product usability - by influencing the GUI
designers in the first place so that screen shots aren't necessary.

For our new manual at OmniMark introducing our new GUI, I plan to use ONE
screen shot - an identity-establishing shot to show the reader they really
have started the component I have described.

Fortunately, the GUI was well-designed by OmniMark developers. I'll have a
few more tweaks to it when I finish my usability tests, but generally, it's
clear and each graphical view shows what the option you select says it will
show.

In another GUI for a software companies I've worked for in Ottawa, I needed
each and every screen shot because the GUI was not well designed. The irony
here was that it wasn't the fault of the GUI designers - they were limited
by a horrible semi-graphical environment that used to exist in NetWare, but
that has now been replaced by NetWare's makers, Novell. There was no way
they could escape that terrible GUI. To help the user get anything out of
the documentation of that terrible GUI, I finally convinced the designers to
label each screen with a unique title to which I could refer - something
that the original designers of the old semi-graphical environment at Novell
never did.

- Carl Stieren
Carl Stieren .....................................email: carls -at- cyberus -dot- ca
Technical Writer and Designer......................deep in Silicon Tundra
Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.........................1 hr 40 min from Montreal
Carl's "Text and Subtext" Web Page..................www.cyberus.ca/~carls


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