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This thread has been very interesting. I am a young tech. writer and thus
still can be influenced to be a minimalist or advocate of screens captures
on nearly every page.
I am the lone writer at a software company. My boss would like a screen
shot of nearly every window, screen, dialog/message box - anything the user
might see. Obviously this is overkill. My job is not to capture screens to
place on paper, but to create user documentation.
At the same time our documentation is used as a pre-sales piece. Our
potential customers want to view the documentation to see if our products
solve their problems. They want to do so without having to install the
software, yet they need to have a good understanding of what the software
does. With this in mind, a lot of screen captures help them visualize what
is accomplished using our products. Now, the reviewers at the pre-sales
phase are people writing checks, not users, but the documentation is been
written for users in mind. That means I don't want to put a lot of
unnecessary screen captures in the manual, because they will be working
with the software.
Has anyone had to create a this balance before: pre-sales piece *and* user
manual? If so, how did you handle screen captures? Any advice on how to
handle this?
-Lief Erickson
lerickson -at- mqsoftware -dot- com
