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Many of us have played the role of guide when it comes to helping others with technology. There are the professional scenarios, such as walking an intern through the company’s software, and personal situations, like explaining Google Docs to your tech-challenged friends and family. Sure, if it’s a one-off, you can answer them conversations, but for repetitive tasks a visual guide works best. You don’t need to hire a tutorial writer for the assignment or spend a lot of time on PowerPoint. If you know the steps already, all you need is a tool like Writer.
Scribe watches you complete a task on your computer and then automatically builds a visual, step-by-step guide to the task you can share with others. It is Chrome extension works similarly to a video or walkthrough recorder Loombut the result contains text messages, screenshots and even notes indicating where someone needs to click. You used to build these things entirely by hand. Now a program can do it for you.
Scribe is designed for teams and businesses, but their free plan is very generous. You can record, edit and share any guide online quite freely. (Desktop app recording requires you to subscribe to their hefty Pro plan.) Before you get started, you’ll need to create an account, and yes, you’ll need to give your browser permission to record what’s happening on your screen.
If you’re okay with that, click the Scribe icon from the extension bar of your browser, and from the floating bar, click the red Record button. Now get started clicking through the steps you want to register. When you’re done, you can click on Complete recording button from the control bar to stop recording.
This action opens the guide in a new tab, with the title, screenshots, and steps ready to go. You are now free to edit it all however you want, complete with an illustrative title and description. Scribe’s steps can also seem too simple sometimes, so it helps to edit them with additional details. If you want, you can even add more steps by bringing your own photos, but these things are purely optional. When you’re done, click Copy link button and share the guide with anyone who would benefit from it.
Scribe’s free plan only lets you record steps in your browser, so it’s best suited for debugging web apps. If you want to record an app from your computer or smartphone, you’ll need to upgrade to the Pro plan starting at $29/month. (The Pro plan also lets you edit photos to blur sensitive information, add branding, and more.)
