How do you capture screenshots for simulations???

[elearningguy123]

Hey everyone!

My team and I are looking to improve our screenshot capture process and would love to get a discuss started to see how different teams and companies capture screenshots for simulations.

I work for a large financial institution and we don't have direct access to the live systems, so therefore, we mainly depend on SMEs to capture all the screenshots for us. We have told them to use the Print Screen button and paste them into a PPT presentation. We then get the screenshots are scrub out the live data. This process works OK, but different SMEs have different screen resolutions, the sizes can change and quality can suffer. Also, sometimes the SMEs don't capture every little action (drop down, etc.), so we have to go back and ask for new screenshots a lot and the quality we get isn't as good.

We are trying to improve our screenshot capturing process and would LOVE to learn best practices from others in the simulation world!

How do you all capture screenshots if you don't have access to the system? How do you ensure excellent quality and consistency if you have to depend on SMEs to capture the screenshots for your team?

Let's get this discussion going!!!

Jason

[Captiv8r]

Hi Jason

If I were in your shoes, the first thing I'd suggest would be to ensure all the participants were using the same resolution. Without that, as you have seen, you will end up with a "mish mash" of assorted images. Once things were set to a common agreed upon resolution, then advise them to capture the full screen. That should provide you with the most consistency.

Cheers... Rick

[elearningguy123]

Exactly! We have tried that before and it definitely helps.

I'm just curious how other shops/companies go about capturing screenshots (or asking for screenshots from SMEs)?

[RodWard]

To tell the truth, I NEVER let SMEs take their own captures.  They can never get everything right because this aspect of Captivate is actually a lot more challenging than most people believe.

But if you DO go that route, to have any hope of achieving a professional result your SMEs will need at least ONE license of Captivate that they can share when they need to take captures for you.

Rick is correct that getting the right size of capture consistently used across the entire project is essential.  Early in the project you need to standardize the dimensions of your Captivate screen and ALL CAPTURES must be taken at this exact size.  Otherwise the result can look awful and be difficult for end users to view.

Another critical aspect is that all SMEs must use the same approach to capturing the application window or whatever, so that the top-left pixel point is exactly the same across all captures.  Otherwise the result will seem like your background is "jumping around" as the user views it.

[BDuckWorks]

1) In a similar situation with a web based system, we started in a conference room where the SME could login to the system on my laptop that had Captivate installed. We projected the laptop, I setup Captivate to record the system, and had the SME run through a single task / procedure they were looking to document.

Since the IT group had documented the tasks and procedures that the system needed to support, for testing purposes, we were able use a spreadsheet to project the cost of having: both of us, a conference room, the projector, even the replacement cost of the bulb!

I took this to my manager and it nearly supported the hiring of another Instructional Designer.

We discussed the projection with the SME's manager and they decided to purchase another license of Captivate for the SME, with a little coaching, a lot of review trials, and some work on templates (Captivate slide masters, RTL files, etc.), the SME was able able to do her own captures to a local drive.

After moving the captures to a shared drive that I could access, I could copy them down to my machine and perform edits. This system had redundant backups built in!

2) As an alternate, you should identify the SME's who will capture for you, ensure they're working at the expected resolution, and ask that they get a tool like SnagIt that can capture their screens as graphics OR TEXT. On a 3270 / green screen application I had someone capture the text of the screens and paste to word or text files. These were saved with a screen number in the title of the document and the file name, which allowed searching and reuse of the screens.

I then set up styles in word that used a monospaced font, put a border around the text and centered it on the page. (You could also colorize it to match their screen.) This was well received by the learners as they could immediately differentiate the content of the lessons from their screens.

The approach of using text in word was based on building Instructor Led Training (ILT) that needed Instructor Guides and Participant Guides (IG/PG) rather than eLearning, but may provide an alternative way of looking at the problem.