Why would you buy Clarify if you already own ScreenSteps?
We get the question “Why would I purchase Clarify if I already own ScreenSteps? pretty frequently.
I may not be able to answer that for you but I can tell you why I use both Clarify and ScreenSteps and why we created Clarify in the first place.
Why did we create Clarify?
The simple answer is that we had a need that ScreenSteps wasn’t meeting. We used ScreenSteps all of the time for creating how-to’s and documentation. But there were dozens of times each week when something like ScreenSteps would be perfect. But we didn’t use ScreenSteps. We muddled on with text-only communications.
What were these situations? It was firing off a quick how-to to a customer that only applied to them. It was filing a bug report with a software vendor. It was trying to get help with a technical problem we were having. It was trying to point out website revisions. It was trying to point out key elements of a report.
In each of these situations ScreenSteps seemed too “heavy”. We had to decide what to title the lessons we created. The lessons got stored into our library whether or not we wanted to keep them. And in ScreenSteps we had all of these features that made creating documentation simple but got in the way of quick, one-off communications.
For awhile we tried to add these workflows into ScreenSteps. But it never worked. We never really adopted the new workflows and explaining what ScreenSteps “did” became increasingly difficult as it was trying to do too many things. We decided that we needed to create a totally new product that focused on creating speedy, one-off communications instead of creating documentation. It was take the essential parts of ScreenSteps and streamline them. That is what Clarify is.
So what do I use now? Read the rest of this entry »
