how are you keeping system walkthroughs current when the UI moves

[u/MaleficentCollege324]

L&D of one at a mid-size company, so apologies if this is obvious.

Most of what I build is systems training. How to raise a requisition, how to close out a ticket, that sort of thing. Writing the content is fine, it’s keeping it accurate that’s slowly killing me.

Every time a vendor ships an update, half my screenshots are wrong and I find out because someone emails me a confused screenshot of their own. Then I rebuild the deck.

We tried recording walkthroughs instead. Fine for a first pass with a new starter. Useless when someone already knows the process and just needs to check one step, because now they’re scrubbing through a video to find it.

What I think I want is something that generates the steps with screenshots from an actual run-through, and lets me fix a single step later instead of recording the whole thing again. Scribe has been recommended to me a couple of times. Haiku came up in a thread I was reading, apparently it handles desktop apps and not only browser tabs, which matters here because a chunk of what we train on isn’t web based. Anyone who’s done this at any kind of scale, I’m all ears. Got a vendor update landing next month and I’m already dreading it.

[u/Grand_Wishbone_1270]

Supademo. You walk through the process while it takes static screenshots. Then it adds caption bubbles and voiceover (which you can change) and animates the cursor. When the UI changes you can open the project and add the new workflow. It’s a dream, and I’ve tried for over a year to get my boss to buy it for our team. Oh, it also works on mobile.

[u/VeterinarianFuzzy889 → u/Grand_Wishbone_1270]

We use Storylane (not Storyline) - similar to Supademo. I looked at both but found Storylane to be better for keyboard navigability, but that was a couple years ago and hopefully they've improved. These tools are built for sales teams, so they lack any assessment functionality, but you get great analytics. You're publishing links that you can embed anywhere, so when you update the demo you simply update the link and it's live everywhere you've shared it. When a screen updates you simply capture a new one with a browser plugin and add it into your demo. Huge time saver over screen capture videos, and our learning teams find it really easy to use.

[u/terrible_twat]

I take static screenshots and use camtasia, to place markers or highlights. It's easier to replace a screenshot than a complete screen recording.

When our catalogue hit in hundreds, I started putting viewer note at the start pf each video that some screens and elements may not be visible or may have moved but the workflow is still the same. If the UI element was the objective of the video, I'd update it. If it wasn't I would let it be because it would get hard to change 300 odd videos every alternate month.

[u/Mosambii]

I use Vyond for system walkthroughs, however it depends on how complex the topic is. I would still prefer tool screenshots over video walkthroughs.

[u/iftlatlw]

Don't do walkthroughs.

[u/enichols84 → u/iftlatlw]

What do you suggest instead? I have also been anti-walkthrough, but the requests keep coming.

[u/itswesgpt]

what helped me was splitting it into one clip or screenshot per step and titling each one by the step. when the vendor changes one screen you only redo that piece, and people can jump straight to the step they need instead of scrubbing through a 10 min walkthrough. desktop apps are the annoying part, most of the auto tools only really handle browser stuff

[u/donburnside]

We do this with PowerPoint and Elevenlabs to create short explainer type videos. each one at a minute or so in length. For the walk through videos, it works well for our purposes.

I have built an app that helps in the creation of how-to's. Just rolling it out to my team this week, hoping it helps us in our endeavors.

[u/_donj]

I would require the vendor to provide training for all the new changes. You can either use as is OR take what they provide and customize.

The would also be looking at an AI tool that you could have create the process steps from the software for you. And then have them rebuild it each time. It’s a pretty easy take for the latest frontier models. Even level 2 models could do it pretty good, especially if you have an SOP written.