Sexed Up Screenshots: making them meaningful in your documentation

by Patrick Hofmann
phofmann@quarry.com

If we had a nickel for every time we placed screen images in our end-user manuals, marketing materials, and online help, we’d all be millionaires. But let’s confess: how many of those screen images have really been helpful to our readers? Originally, our screenshots were welcome, visual blessings in otherwise wordy, tedious instructions. Nowadays, screenshots have become taken for granted and largely mistreated. Our attitude is nearly one of complacency: if the instructions don’t quite do the trick, aw heck, a screenshot will!

In my ongoing survey of instructional visuals and visual instructions, I've discovered that screenshots are suffering more neglect and lack of care than our valiant attempts at simple illustrations and helpful flow diagrams. They're so easy to produce and place in our documents, that we seldom put much thought into their meaning. What are our screenshots trying to say to our readers? What should they be saying? Generally, screenshots lack meaning due to two key problems:

• they contain too much visual traffic for readers to absorb and decipher
• they usually lack a visual anchor or a focus of attention.

With even the most basic paint and publishing tools, we can conquer these two characteristics.

Reduce the Visual Traffic

If your instructions refer to a self-contained window or dialogue box that sits on the screen, just use that element in your screen image. However, if you need to refer to an element on a full screen, how can we best reduce the visual traffic? Let's use the following example, where our objective is to draw attention to the style, typeface, and size dropdown lists on a Microsoft Word screen.

At the very least, crop the image to show enough of the interface so that readers can identify its general location on the screen. Top-of-page menus are usually good indicators of this context, as shown in the following example:

 Before and After: Less is More

To emphasize the location of the cropped area in relation to the full screen, you can combine the original uncropped screen as a thumbnail, and illustrate a magnified callout to the cropped area:

Magnifying a callout of the cropped area

If the callout seems to take up a bit too much real estate, try this more compact alternative: use a thick border to indicate the edge of the original screen, or a tear-off effect to indicate the edge of the cropped area:

Emphasizing the edge of the original screen, or the torn-off edges of the cropped area

The latter can be performed with tools as seemingly primitive as Windows Paint: simply take the eraser tool to remove a subtle jagged edge from the screenshot; then, take a light grey paintbrush and roughly paint over the edge. It's as simple as that.

Amplify the focus of attention

If you've already reduced the visual traffic of the image by cropping it, and it still seems like the focus of attention is not obvious, change the image's brightness and contrast settings to highlight the areas of great importance and darken the areas of less relevance:

Selecting the area around the focus of attention and dimming its brightness by 75%

Although these bells and whistles amplify the focus of your attention for your readers, you should always go old-school by adding a high-contrast, brief, and meaningful annotation:

Annotate the screenshot with lines and text that contrast with the screen image

Make sure your annotations are easily distinguishable from the screenshot itself. Throughout your documents, use high-contrast annotation lines of consistent thickness and text of consistent size. And finally, since these screen images are meant to save time in reading and learning, keep your annotations brief and in point-form, as much as possible!

In the end, whatever file formats you use, whatever image resolutions you choose, your screen images need to instruct and inform your readers – just as the rest of your documentation should. However, if your screen images represent a poorly designed software product, that’s a whole new ballgame: get involved in improving it!