Faster Onboarding Starts With Clear Documentation

All you need to make a guide, tutorial, or instruction is to walk in your new hires' shoes, go through the entire process you’re going to describe, and reflect the process’ logic as a number of steps on your slides.

For example, you need to create a step-by-step tutorial on how to use a corporate project management tool. The primary task is to split a process into simple, easy-understandable, sequential steps. For a complex tool like project management software, you may need to create a multi-layered structure where some tasks have multiple subtasks. For example, you can breakdown a task on adding a task into four steps:

• creating a task;

• defining deadlines;

• setting a priority level;

• assigning a task to a particular team member.

When you build such a chain of steps and back up your structure with screenshots, your material becomes a comprehensive, visual, and easy-to-follow manual, saving your new teammates plenty of time and effort.

With MagicHow, you can create a how-to guide by recording your own steps while performing a task. You click the recording button and go through the task creation procedure. Then, you add titles and annotations to your screenshots, put a logo, blur personal information, and make other retoolings to make your guide well-rounded. Finally, you share your instructions with new hires by sending them a link, downloading your guide, or embedding it on the onboarding portal.

The time required to create a guide for newcomers depends on the topic. For example, creating a manual for booking a meeting room can take five minutes. To compose an instruction on using the CRM, you may obviously need more time.

There are several features developed for adjusting a guide to your goals and your target audience’s expectations. You can optimize your manuals and tutorials quickly and easily by using simple in-built tools. In MagicHow, you can make the following modifications:

• crop a picture, focusing the user’s attention on particular blocks, buttons, forms, or other objects;

• add titles and annotations to your slides, providing extra information;

• blur sensitive data to adhere to ethics and compliance standards;

• insert logos to the slides to brand a document;

• change your guide’s style to make it more relevant to your company’s image and to provide emotional emphasis.

You can amend your slides either during your recording session or after it’s finished. As a final step, you can share, download, or embed your step-by-step manual.

Both options are available to provide you with maximum opportunities. A browser version is compatible with the following browsers:

• Chrome;

• Firefox;

• Edge;

• Safari.

A desktop version is also at your service, allowing you to create how-to guides without relying on an internet connection and giving you greater control over the software's performance.

You have several options to make your tutorials, manuals, and instructions accessible for your new team members. Here is the list of opportunities:

• sharing via a link, varying the access parameters;

• exporting in PDF;

• copying a guide as HTML or Markdown;

• embedding a document in such popular tools as Notion or Confluence.

Be attentive and avoid confusion between embedding a guide and inserting it as a Markdown. Use the first option if it’s vital to update your instructions on the third-party websites according to the latest changes in the original document.

We want our tool to be accessible to as many people as possible so that they can save time and effort in creating guides, tutorials, and instructions. Therefore, the majority of our features are available for free. However, some advanced features are expected to be paid for, but the price is more than affordable. The premium subscription allows us to invest in improving our product for you.