I've recently had to do a great deal of help files for a new
client. They wanted a pop-up window on every page of their website
to walk a user through filling out complex forms that were required
for information gathering. I quickly found that creating these
pop-ups was taking me longer than completing the actual website. It
is extremely difficult to document every field on the form and
explain conditional fields to a user without walking through the
process in great detail with screen shots and text. Our site
testers hated the pop-ups. They were large and required a lot of
editing of images and text.
There has to be an easier way!!!
In walks Adobe Captivate. I know
this is not a new product. It has been around a while and has had
several names through the years. I've used it for personal
projects. A company I worked for in the past used it to create
testing for their classroom training. It is a slick little
product.
But I have never used it on a client site and never to the scale
required for this project. So I decided to do a little training
over the weekend on Captivate to see if I could convince the client
to change the help pop-up format.
I used a Lynda.com training session that literally
took a few hours of time to go through. There were so many features
of the software that I didn't know about. Features that would have
taken weeks to learn through trial and error. Talk about money well
spent.
Now I knew the best way to approach the process. Prior to
starting the help files I created a custom skin, a layout template
and a common library of items to use on every help file. Then in a
matter of 30 minutes or so I was able to create my first help file.
I choose a complex form that had a lot of conditional form fields,
just to see if I could do it. Not only was it an easy process, but
I was able to visually show a user all of the possibilities that
would happen depending on how they filled out the form. The end
product was a three minute flash file that was easy to add in a
pop-up.
Monday came and I was able to demo it in the morning status
meeting. So did they like it? Hell ya they did! Some poor sap lost
their "Employee of the Month" rockstar parking place. Ok.... slight
exaggeration.
I ended up training a few of the client's employees on the
product. Soon they were handing us completed Captivate files for
all of the pages of the site that had been completed and signed off
on. Which reduced the work of the high dollar programmers and
involved the client more in the project.
The next round of site testing went much smoother. The testers
loved them.
Overall it was an easy, inexpensive solution to a difficult
problem that everyone was happy with.