Teams are deleting screenshots from their docs. Should you?

I spent nearly a decade in Support, at Zapier and then Postman, and screenshots were part of almost every help article I touched. So I was a little stunned when the technical writing team at a multi-billion dollar company told me what they'd done with theirs.

"We removed all screenshots from our docs. Although 70% of our user base is not technical, our product can get pretty technical, pretty quickly."

The same team told me why. "We just spend hours finding and updating screenshots! ChatGPT and Claude are terrible at it. We tried everything, trust me."

I do, I do trust them.

I've had some version of this conversation with about 120 knowledge managers and technical writers, and nearly all of them said the same thing in almost the same words: "Maintaining screenshots is awful!" So the question keeps coming up. Should documentation include screenshots at all, if keeping them current is this painful?

My answer is yes. And I think screenshots in help center articles are about to become more important, which means the thing that has to change is how we maintain them.

Why teams are removing screenshots from their docs

Roughly 70% of the support leaders, technical writers and knowledge managers I've spoken to have said screenshots are the bane of their existence. When I ask what updating them actually involves, the process sounds like this:

1. Populate test data on the new feature.

2. Take new screenshots.

3. Run a basic keyword search on the help docs to find articles where outdated screenshots might exist.

4. Delete the old screenshots.

5. Annotate the new ones somewhere else.

6. Upload them back into the help content, article by article.

By my own estimate, a UI update can straight up eat 4 hours off someone's week. And UI updates are coming faster than ever, because coding tools like Claude Code have made it easier and quicker to change the interface. More changes mean more stale screenshots, and the backlog grows every release. GAH!

Research on learning doesn't matter much if the cost outweighs the benefit, so I understand why teams give up. But deleting screenshots leaves the maintenance problem where it was and takes away something users need.

Should documentation include screenshots?

Yes, as long as each screenshot is relevant, accurate and sitting next to the step it explains. The research behind this goes back more than 50 years.

Allan Paivio's dual coding theory, from 1971, found that we process words and pictures separately. When a help article gives someone a written step and a screenshot of that step, their brain gets two routes back to the information instead of one.

Richard Mayer later tested this directly with explanatory content, like how a tire pump works or how lightning forms. Learners who got words with relevant graphics did far better on transfer tests, which means applying the idea to a new problem. The median effect size across those experiments was d = 1.39. For comparison, John Hattie's synthesis of more than 800 meta-analyses puts the average effect of any teaching method at around d = 0.40. Adding the right picture to text beats that by a lot.

Which screenshots help and which ones hurt

The same research is clear that bad visuals make things worse. Three show up in help centers all the time:

• Decorative images. Pictures that are interesting but irrelevant measurably reduce learning.

• Screenshots far from the words. A screenshot placed a long way from the sentence explaining it loses most of the benefit.

• Saying it twice. A screenshot of an error message, followed by the same error written out in full, overloads the verbal channel. Alt text is a different thing and still matters.

The fix for all three is the same: relevant, accurate screenshots placed right next to the step they show.

Who lands on a help article

Experts can learn from text alone, and for them an image that repeats the text adds very little. Kalyuga and Sweller call this the expertise reversal effect.

But think about who actually opens a help article. It's usually one of two people:

• Someone new to your product.

• An existing user who couldn't figure something out on their own.

Both are exactly the readers who benefit most from seeing the screen. Every support leader in that 70% group supports a product used by people who aren't always tech savvy and need that visual help to self-serve. That multi-billion dollar company's own user base is 70% non-technical.

AI support agents now show screenshots in chat

Earlier this year I was chatting with Intercom's Fin, and it replied with screenshots. That surprised me even more than the complaints did. Intercom's help docs now describe the feature: Fin can include up to three relevant images or GIFs from your existing support content in its replies. It's on by default, and Fin never generates new images. It only uses ones that already exist in your help center and other connected content.

I read that as a signal. Intercom is one of the companies setting the direction for AI agents in Support, and while more bots are reading our support content, visual aid is becoming more important. Maybe some of those screenshots won't come straight from help center articles. Agents might fetch screenshots in real time based on the user's question. Either way, if your user base is non-technical, great first-line support gets harder without screenshots, and an agent can only show the images you've kept.

Alt text and image descriptions matter here too. On tools like Intercom that support them, they help AI agents retrieve the right content and the right screenshot. Writing them by hand for every image isn't fun, which is one more reason the manual process needs to go.

How screenshot maintenance is changing

This is a prediction, but one thing I'm sure of: we won't keep maintaining screenshots the old way. Agents will take over that six-step routine across hundreds and thousands of articles, much faster than any person could. The humans, as always, form the most critical quality layer before the help content sees the light of day.

That's the problem Pageloop works on. When your product changes, Pageloop's agent navigates your app and captures fresh screenshots for the articles that change affects. You review each replacement and hit Accept, so a person still approves every change before it publishes. You can also record a change yourself with the Pageloop Chrome extension, or hand over your release notes, and Pageloop reviews your whole help center for the articles that need updating. If you'd rather tackle the backlog by hand first, our guide on how to find and fix outdated screenshots in your help center walks through spotting stale images and keeping them current after each release.

Some tools that turn a video into docs add a screenshot for every single step. That's a maintenance nightmare, even with Claude or ChatGPT helping. Pageloop adds screenshots only where they're necessary, learning from your existing articles and customer interactions.

Whether we like it or not, screenshots give users useful visual guidance, and they're here to stay. The teams giving up on them now may have a hard time catching up when their AI agent starts answering with pictures.

So before you delete the next screenshot, is the screenshot really the problem, or is it the way you're keeping it up to date?


Photo by Boston Public Library on Unsplash
The Mosquito Trail, Rocky Mountains of Colorado, elevation 12,000 feet Artist: Moran, Thomas, 1837-1926