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> I'm struggling with "usable" screen captures. I tend to circle and
> annotate screen elements with word bubbles, but those tend to get busy
> fast. I thought about circling and annotating with circled letters, then
> referring to those letters below.
Why?
> Is that more or less useful?
Depends. What are you trying to communicate?
> How do
> you annotate your screen shots?
Depends. If I'm giving an instruction, I show only the thing that needs to
be acted upon, plus enough contextual information to make it locatable.
Generally the nearest corner or border is more than enough. Verbal context
is often just as useful.
I *never* capture a whole window just to talk about one tiny little piece of
it. That's the sort of thing a programmer would do, not a professional
communicator.
If my purpose is to explain the overall design of an entire window (and
there's rarely a need for that, except in the most ineptly designed GUIs)
then I would use simple callouts or hotspots to label the major sections.
Generally in such cases my time is better spent helping the programmers
design the GUI so that it doesn't need "explaining."
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