When creating software documentation, we do a lot of things on top of the actual text content writing. This often involves design, graphics creation, video authoring, community building, and more. And the good news is that most of these tasks can be solved with free tools and services. In this post, you will learn more about such tools, and how they can help you save the documentation budget along with making your job easier.

Here is what we are going to talk about:

Video & Image Editing

Community & Social Networking

Statistics & Analytics

So, let’s get started by taking a look at some free video and image editing tools.

Video & Image Editing

FastStone Image Viewer

FastStone Image Viewer is a tool for image viewing, converting and editing images. Above all, FSImageViewer is freeware for Windows that allows effective picture browsing. And, by effective, we mean fast and convenient. The UI is very intuitive, Windows Explorer-like. The program does a great job displaying all the pictures fast, even when you have some big files (in the RAW format, for example), the delay will be minimal.

The range of supported formats is also a strong point. All major graphic formats are on the list: GIF, PNG, TGA, BMP, JPEG, JPEG 2000, PCX, TIFF, WMF, ICO, etc.

But, why is this tool so interesting in terms of documentation authoring? If you look at this freeware a bit closer, you’ll be able to see its great editing potential. Besides providing users with numerous brushes and filters, this lightweight tool can do a lot:

crop, resize, rotate pictures

adjust color, levels, curves, etc.

apply image color effects and other special effects (drop shadow, framing, annotation, etc.)

draw lines, texts, geometric shapes and callout objects

manage images (including the possibility of creating tags)

etc.

FSImageViewer can cover all basic tasks as far as screenshots and other images in documentation are concerned. Of course, it is not as functional as Adobe Photoshop or other super multi-functional editing products, but, being a free tool, it still can make the famous Adobe software a bit nervous.

Even more pros here: there’s a portable version of the tool that can be run from a removable storage device.

Now, to the cons.

Though, the number of supported formats is quite impressive for a free tool, sadly, you can not convert images to some of them.

The truth is you won’t be amazed by the product design either, but that can only mean that the developers put much more thought and effort into the functionality, than the tool’s look and feel. It is not critical, of course, as long as all the needed functions are at hand, but, still, FastStone Image Viewer is failing to live up to what’s expected by the modern audience.

In conclusion, we can say that FastStone Image Viewer is a high-quality tool with a great potential to become your favourite image editor. It has vast functionality to cover the needs of a technical documentation writer, it is easy to use and fast. Besides, the tool is regularly updated. So, if you decide to get picky — just remember that this is a free tool after all :)

LICEcap

LICEcap is a freeware program for creating GIF animations by capturing some area of your screen. There are Windows and Mac versions of this tool.

GIF files are often used by techwriters as this format offers an easy way of demonstrating something quickly. And, talking about online documentation, GIFs are supported by any modern browser.

If you have been looking for an extremely simple tool to quickly produce some GIFs — I’ve just found one. Here’s what this freeware does:

recording captures directly to GIF or LCF (its own format allowing higher quality that can be opened with third-party software, i.e. REAPER)

moving the recording area around the screen

pausing and restarting recording

inserting a text frame with customizable duration

adjusting frame rate

recording mouse clicks

etc.

As you can see, LICEcap can come in handy for technical documentation — you can use it for creating short demonstrations or to add visuality to your help topics and tutorials. The recording goes like this: you launch the program, resize the recording window, set max FPS, and click ‘Record’.

After the recording process is started, you can move the window across the screen, but it won’t let you resize anymore.

If you click ‘Pause’, a new option will become available — text frame insertion.

The most obvious drawback of this freeware tool is — it can’t do editing. So, if you need more than just a quick screen capture, unfortunately, you’ll have to look elsewhere. Plus, LICEcap won’t allow capturing a full desktop, which is bad news also.

And, you shouldn’t be expecting too high a quality from the resulting GIF files — they are at 256 colors max. What you should expect though is overlarge resulting files regardless of their size or length.

To sum this review up, LICEcap can’t do much in terms of editing (to be more specific — it can do nothing at all), but it is serving its main purpose well, which is providing a super fast and easy way of creating GIF animations recording your desktop.

Advanced Image Editing — GIMP

You all, probably, know this one. GIMP is a freeware tool for Windows, OS X and Linux, that dares competing with Photoshop, and we mean it! What started out as a school project back in 1995 according to Wikipedia, has grown into a complex and powerful open-source graphics editor considered by many the best free tool of the kind out there. This tool supports all popular formats, and it is updated on a regular basis.

Indeed, GIMP is complex and multifunctional (mostly, because it is extremely plugin- and extension-friendly), so we won’t go into too much detail in our review. Let’s concentrate on what it can bring to the techwriter’s table.

Well, surely, this tool possesses all the necessary functionality for screenshot/image editing. Resizing, cropping, adding text, drawing lines and additional elements… But, using it only for these basic things would be a waste of functionality. With the GIMP toolset, you can work on customizing your documentation design to increase your user manual’s usability, make it more visually attractive and unique.

But, its greatest weakness arises from its very strength — to master this tool is not that easy. The user interface kind of reminds us of Adobe PS in a way, but when you look closer or try actually doing something more or less complicated in GIMP, you’ll realise that you’ll have to learn first. On the bright side, there are many user forums, tutorials and trainings that can help.

Another thing is that, although plug-ins are truly numerous, they need to be downloaded from all over the Internet.

All in all, GIMP is a one-of-a-kind offer — tons of functionality for free. It is a stable tool of high quality, and if you are not scared of learning something new, you should give GIMP a try. It can help you perform image editing tasks of any difficulty. As we always say — technical documentation must be beautiful!

Community & Social Networking

Disqus — Commenting Service

We are going to start with Disqus, an online commenting service that got very popular and being used in various online resources — from blogs to software documentation. This popular free service can be added to websites or communities allowing people to leave feedback, discuss the material, and even get assistance from others. Wikipedia states that around 75% of websites, who used a third-party commenting or discussion system, chose Disqus in 2011.

The idea is very simple — you create a Disqus account, and then it will give you ready HTML markup to insert to your web pages. Once you do this, your pages get a commenting area at the bottom. It supports comments moderation and management, so you are notified when a new comment is added to your page, you can delete the comments if required.

No logging in is obligatory if someone just wants to leave a comment — guest comments are supported. But, this way, the user would miss one of the most interesting Disqus features — keeping history of all of the comments in one place. When users authenticate in Disqus when leaving comments, they get a Disqus profile and can see all the comments they ever left in online resources that use Disqus.

Since user manuals are also online resources, using such commenting services makes total sense — you give your users a way to leave their feedback right in the context of the topic they are reading. This way, you can both assist them easier by answering their question and also improve the topic in the future to cover that question. With this idea in mind, we have built Disqus support in our ownsoftware documentation tool.

We have also realized that Disqus can be used as a collaboration platform — giving the documentation writers a way to discuss things before they are published to the end users. We described this usage scenario in this blog post: User Comments in Online Documentation. What is really great about this tool is that, basically, it allows you to build a community for free. And, we consider an online documentation portal a great platform for building a user community.

Being a free tool, Disqus makes money from ads. And, its Privacy Policy warns that some non-personally identifiable information can be disclosed for whatever reason to any third-party and also used for ad targeting. This is expected and from our experience their ads are not disturbing, so that’s fine.

To sum this up, Disqus is a huge and very popular commenting system. It allows you to easily start building a community of real people around your content. This tool is fast to implement and easy to use.

AddThis — Social Tools

AddThis gives you a quick way to add sharing buttons to any online resource — your website, online user manuals, FAQ pages, etc.

In general, sharing buttons is good stuff. When people share your content through social networks, this brings more traffic and can give additional exposure to your company. It is a form of free advertising, you just need to create some great content first.

If you have some truly unique and interesting content that you believe people might want to share with others — you need to give them this opportunity. And, it better be convenient and easy. When there are no sharing buttons within reach, people won’t do anything. We are getting lazy, and “copy/paste” is no longer an option. Living in the hi-tech world with marketing and UX playing the leading role has changed our habits — we expect the right things to appear at the right time in the right place. So, AddThis and such-like services would be of great help.

This is an example of how AddThis buttons look on our website:

AddThis has quite a lot of positive feedback from those who use it. The tool also integrates with Google Analytics.

SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is a great service for collecting feedback. This tool is used for creating surveys and analysing the results later.

Surveys can be used for both: interaction inside your team (Where do we go next Friday folks?) and getting feedback from customers (Which feature of our product do you like most?).

It goes without saying that the free basic plan has some restriction. But it will still work for a pretty big team (and, from our experience, documentation teams are usually rather small). For example, as of the current date, you can create a survey with up to 10 questions and get a hundred answers for it without spending a dollar. This works like magic if you need to quickly get what people think about some changes in documentation, changes in the workflow, whether they are digging the new color scheme… pretty much anything.

You can easily create a survey and add a link to your user manuals to receive feedback. Register on the SurveyMonkey website, then click the Create Survey button on the home page as shown below:

Get creative (or go simple) with the survey Builder. After you’re done with the questions, click Next:

You’ll find yourself on a page with a customizable link for your newly created survey. It’ll look somewhat like this:

Insert this link in your help topic or your web site and voila!

The best thing about Survey Monkey — you don’t need to have any special skills to be able to work with it. The resulting survey layout is very clean and simple:

Even though the free version has some restrictions, we would recommend this tool. It is a “must have” for doing a quick research.

Statistics & Analytics

Analyzing statistical data and coming to right conclusions can become your guiding light on the road to success, can help you see the right direction for further development. Well, all of this is achievable only with the right tools. In this blog post we’ll try to find out what free services can offer to us. Let me jump ahead of myself and tell you — tons of useful statistics can be done for free, so we will also try to understand how to use all this data to get maximum benefit.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is immense. Just think about it. As Wikipedia puts it — almost 50% of top million websites are using it. I doubt we even need an introduction for this review, but, for all Marty McFly’s out there, here it is: Google Analytics is a free statistics service launched by Google in 2005 to track web traffic. You can get statistics for both desktop and mobile traffic here.

To say the truth, it is not entirely free — it is freemium. Google does offer a lot to enterprise. But, even if you stay with the free version, somehow, you won’t really get the feeling that you are using an incomplete product with limited functionality. Before even considering buying a GA license, you need to make sure that you have enough human resources (and money :) ). Otherwise, you’ll end up using the same basic features that are offered for free, only you will be paying a lot. You can spend a whole day trying to do some deep analysis on the Google Analytics page, and you’ll merely scratch the surface.

A wide range of goals can be achieved with the GA tools. From simple page view count to complex eCommerce research.

To make sure you don’t get overwhelmed with all the features, you can finish Google’s online courses, get support or watch educational videos on YouTube — all free.

We are using Google Analytics for both our ClickHelp Documentation and the website. We’d like to share our all time favorite GA functionality with you.

Our own history of working with this Google service shows that Google Analytics is not only for websites — it can help making online documentation a better user experience. There are many resources that talk about using GA for websites, so let us focus on some ideas that apply to online documentation:

Audience | Demographics — say hello to your average client. The entire Audience section is the first thing you need to explore and think over. Here you get a clear idea of who your target audience is. Try to generalize your observations, mentally draw a portrait of your client. What are their interests? Age? Country? To realise how to develop your product further, your target audience is the main thing that needs to be taken into account.

— say hello to your average client. The entire Audience section is the first thing you need to explore and think over. Here you get a clear idea of who your target audience is. Try to generalize your observations, mentally draw a portrait of your client. What are their interests? Age? Country? To realise how to develop your product further, your target audience is the main thing that needs to be taken into account. Audience | Mobile | Overview — knowing what devices people use to view your documentation can help you get your screenshot sizes right. Take a closer look at screen resolutions of the devices used the most and resize images in your user manuals accordingly. Also, make sure you don’t have any small elements — they can be hard to click on a mobile screen — if you’re getting a lot of mobile traffic.

Behaviour | Site Content | All Pages — learning what help topics are viewed more often than others can show you what product features require special attention from users. This can mean that the functionality needs to be improved (if we are talking about software documentation) because users need some additional explanation in this regard. Also, for your documentation team, these popular topics should become a number one priority. This is a good practice to update such topics first and make them more comprehensible (e.g. by adding screenshots, videos, examples, etc.)

— learning what help topics are viewed more often than others can show you what product features require special attention from users. This can mean that the functionality needs to be improved (if we are talking about software documentation) because users need some additional explanation in this regard. Also, for your documentation team, these popular topics should become a number one priority. This is a good practice to update such topics first and make them more comprehensible (e.g. by adding screenshots, videos, examples, etc.) Acquisition | All Traffic | Referrals — this page can also help you track where people come from. When you use context sensitive help in your online tool, this section can show you which screens generate the most clicks. Most probably, those screens are hard to understand and users often need assistance. This should be a signal to your software developers and UX designer — they need to do something with those screens to help the users.

By looking at your online help stats in GA, you can make you own conclusions and some of them may be pretty unexpected. Let’s also cover some of the ideas how you can use Google Analytics for you website.You will see how the same GA pages can be interpreted differently depending on your goals:

Acquisition | All Traffic | Channels — here you can analyse how people get on your website. Keep in mind that your Social and Organic Traffics are the two things that will boost your online presence and drive your business in the long term.

— here you can analyse how people get on your website. Keep in mind that your Social and Organic Traffics are the two things that will boost your online presence and drive your business in the long term. Behaviour | Site Content | All Pages — tracking page views is a great way to understanding how changes on your website affect traffic. For example, if Bounce Rate on some particular page goes down while the number of visitors increases — congratulations! You have done something right. Now, you need to figure out what it was :)

— tracking page views is a great way to understanding how changes on your website affect traffic. For example, if Bounce Rate on some particular page goes down while the number of visitors increases — congratulations! You have done something right. Now, you need to figure out what it was :) Acquisition | All Traffic | Referrals — this page displays how many people come to your website by clicking links on other sites. Going through these metrics will give you an idea of how good your current marketing strategy is (ads, guest blogs, etc.)

— this page displays how many people come to your website by clicking links on other sites. Going through these metrics will give you an idea of how good your current marketing strategy is (ads, guest blogs, etc.) Behavior | In-Page Analytics — the last but not the least. With this functionality, you can find out how changes of your web pages UI change the user behaviour on that page. Knowing how often specific links and buttons are clicked can help you choose the right page layout, wording, color scheme, etc.

The more you use Google Analytics, the clearer you understand what works and what doesn’t. Gaining more experience in this field will help you learn a lot about your audience, the market you are in, what is expected of your company and much more. Google Analytics is a service that we would highly recommend for any company, regardless of its size and structure, for analyzing online documentation and websites.

Webmaster Tools

Webmaster Tools is a great addition to Google Analytics that deals mostly with SEO. Working together, these services can make your life much easier. While GA can scare people off with its copious functionality, Webmaster Tools is simpler and easier to handle.

The main idea behind Webmaster Tools is websites indexing. You need to submit your sitemap here to ensure your site is indexed properly.

Once the website is indexed, you can sit back, relax, and reap the benefits — that is, increased visibility on the web and improved views count. Next time you’ll need to worry about indexing is when your website gets updated. Webmaster tools can help index the updated pages, so they will be visible in search engines as soon as possible.

This free tool is used to fine tune the indexing process, as well. For example, you can exclude some pages from the search using the robots.txt file (What is robots.txt?), and then use Webmaster Tools to make sure you did it right.

Webmaster Tools is great for analysing the search keywords people use in Google when they get to your website or online help. Looking through keywords can help you see what people were looking for and expecting to find. You might even reconsider your keyword strategy: paraphrase or delete unused keywords, add new ones that are gaining popularity.

All in all this service is a good choice to boost your SEO efforts and make your website more visible.

Summary

Creating online user manuals is much more than text writing. Technical writers do a solve of different tasks when writing user guides. And there are many free tools that help companies turn their online help into strategic business asset, and make it a great SEO tool.

If you know about other free tools that companies can use in their documentation tasks, share the links in the comments!

Good luck with your technical writing,

ClickHelp — Professional Technical Writing Tool