Wrong way to create user guides
Would you like to create professional looking guides in just minutes? Well, in this video, I'm going to show you the easiest way to create step-by-step guides that your users will absolutely love. So let's dive in.
About 10 minutes ago, I started creating this user guide within Google docs and already I'm extremely frustrated and I'm only at step three.
Do you know how time consuming it is to write out every step and then go and grab that screenshot and then come back and paste it and then go to the next step? And then I got to go back and grab that screenshot.
And then, oh, did I remember the step in between. This took me 10 minutes to complete already, and I don't even have any highlights within this particular user guide.
Meanwhile, earlier today I took just 55 seconds to create this nine step guide which includes links, which includes highlights. And I didn't enter in any of this text and look at how beautiful and easy this guide is to read.
How did I do it? By using a free tool called Scribe. And yes, you heard that right, it's free. With scribe, I can create documentation, training materials, how-to guides, or maybe even for my own purposes. So I can remember how to do that complicated thing in QuickBooks.
How to create a Scribe guide
So let me show you how it works. Here I am within my Scribe dashboard and as you can see, I've already created several Scribes.
Now the great thing about Scribes is that they're easy to share and they're also easy to edit if I ever need to come back and make some minor changes but let's go ahead and create a Scribe from scratch.
All we need to do is come up here to the top and select new.
And when you have the extension installed, you can also access it from your browser as well. I'm going to select new Scribe in this case. And either it can help me launch a new tab or I want to show people how to do something or find something within Google Drive.
So I'm going to select Google Drive. The capture has started, indicated also by this flashing icon in the bottom left hand corner. Now, Scribe is not recording any of my audio. In fact, I'm not wasting any time just by moving my cursor around,
because scribe is only going to record my actions. It's going to take a look at where I am clicking or what text I am entering. And it's going to record all of that and produce a beautiful how-to guide. So in this case, I'm going to come down here and I'm going to right click on this file and I'm going to select share.
And then on this screen, I'm going to go and find someone to share this with. I'm going to select that individual here. I'm going to change them from an editor to a viewer. And then I'm going to come up to this icon.
This is what a lot of people miss or don't realize that there's some additional settings and I'm going to uncheck both of these boxes.
I'm going to go back and then I'm going to hit send. So as you can see, that only took me a few seconds, less than a minute to do all of those different steps, but let's go and see what Scribe is going to do. When I'm ready, I can come down here, click on the icon. I can either pause my recording.
I can delete this particular scribe. I can always move these controls if they happen to be in the way. But in my case, I'm just going to say complete recording. And in a new tab, it's going to show me my scribe
Editing your user guide
so I can review it and make any changes if necessary. At the very top, it's going to give maybe some type of default title because I happen to be in Google Drive but I'm going to say this is, this was How To Change Share Settings.
Maybe something like that. I can even give it a unique icon if I want here. And because Google is often a little more associated with maybe a green color here. I kind of like that document though. Let's keep with that document.
Down below, it shows that there are a total of 13 steps and it took me 57 seconds to record, but chances are I probably could have done that in 25 seconds if I wasn't narrating what I was doing. So down below the very first step is to navigate two.
And yes, it's even going to record your URL, because that's probably going to be helpful if you're directing someone to a particular website or a particular application. The great thing is is that all of this is editable.
So for example, if I don't want them to go to that full length there, I can just delete what I don't need. And boom, it's still going to be clickable for the user. Go to drive.google.com. Starting in step two, you can see that scribe has recorded all of my actions in detail.
Yes, I right clicked on this particular image. It will even have this helpful circle color showing exactly where I clicked. Then I clicked shared and then I clicked on this box as well. And an additional built in bonus is that scribe is zooming in on my actions. You can see here, it hasn't just taken a screenshot of everything.
It has zoomed in specifically on the icon or in this case the dropdown in which I selected. Now you can make changes to this.
If you want to pull it back a little bit more, or maybe you want to pan it around, you can do so, but I love how without even changing a single thing, I could probably go ahead and just send this off to the person whom I want to share this with. Now, each of these stages can be editable.
So for example, in this step down below, I did start to type in the letters Sc to search for this email address but you know what, I'm actually going to remove that step.
So I'm going to say delete, because I think this is pretty self explanatory and no,
I don't want them to click or search for that particular user. So I can come in here and edit this. Maybe I can say search for the user you want to share the file with, something like that.
So each of these stages are editable. If I want to, I can also come in here and edit the image as well. So if I'd like to crop that image or maybe I want to annotate, maybe I want to really specify a particular area.
I can create an arrow such as this. I also like that scribe has added a redact forever area. So for example, maybe I want to make sure that we are not sharing other people's email addresses down below.
So I can just cover over this area. And I can say done here in the top right hand corner and now we're returned to my scribe. It's going to update that image. So we've got the arrow and now those email addresses are removed as well.
Sharing your guide with others
Now, when we're all happy with our scribe, the very next step would be to come
and share it with someone else. Now, probably the easiest way is going to be
to copy that link. And if I open up a new incognito window, I'm just going to paste it in here. You can see it's exactly what we saw in the editing mode. Of course they can't edit it, but things like the link.
Perfect. They can go directly to their drive account. They can come through here and see all of the steps in which we recorded but that's not the only way in which we can share. If you would like to share directly from scribe,
you can enter in the email addresses of those that you'd like to share your guide with.
Or we can also export it in a variety of ways, probably exporting as a PDF makes the most sense or is going to be the easiest for people. Just show you very quickly what that PDF will look like.
Essentially what we saw before, but nice and clean, direct, easy to follow and so much quicker than recording a video. Quicker for you, because it takes you only a few seconds or minutes to produce and quicker for them to digest,
because maybe they just need to skip down to step number eight, for example, and they don't want to have to sit through the first three or four minutes of your video.
Now you can create and share as many guides as you want for free. And if you need to record things out of your browser, you can upgrade to this scribe pro plan.
To get started with scribe and to create your first how-to guide, be sure to click the link in the description down below. And if you enjoyed this video, you're going to love these free Chrome extensions that will help you get the most out of your day.
Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
