When I go to download a piece of software, I want to know what it looks like.
Our site usability testing suggests that it’s what most other people want, too. If your project summary was enough to catch their attention, and they’ve clicked through to your project summary page. They’re going to want some idea of what the software looks like. This is your chance to impress them with your design, and illustrate your most impressive features. It’s all very well to say that the software wrangles wibbles, they want to see it wrangling wibbles.
The screen shots are one of the primary ways that potential users will compare your product to the competition prior to choosing something and downloading it. Most people won’t download five alternatives and install them – they’ll make a quick judgement based on your summary page, and, most importantly, your screen captures.
See Sweet Home 3D for a great example of effective screen captures.
Even if your product is a command-line product, there’s probably something that you can make a screenshot of. Perhaps a menu, or the help text. This tells the user that the product doesn’t have a GUI, which is itself an important thing to communicate.
All else being equal, users will select the product with screen captures over the one without. This is probably not fair much of the time, but people are busy, and they simply don’t have time to do a full feature comparison of the alternatives.
Taking screen shots is pretty simple, although the exact technique varies with operating system.
On Windows, press the PrintScrn button to capture the whole screen, or ALT + PrintScrn to capture just the active window. This copies the image to your clipboard for pasting into your favorite graphics editing program.
On Mac OS X, press SHIFT + COMMAND + 4 to active the screen capture tool. You’ll see crosshairs appear, which you’ll need to drag around the area you want to capture. This will produce a PNG file which will be dropped on your desktop.
On Linux, there are a variety of tools available, including KSnapshot, gnome-panel-screenshot and Shutter, while some distros have screen shots right in the main menus (It’s at Applications -> Accessories -> Take Screenshot on Ubuntu).
Only GIF, JPEG and PNG images of resolutions between 150×150 pixels and 640×480 pixels are accepted. Larger images will be rescaled to 640×480. Files up to 300kb in size may be uploaded; larger files will be rejected.
Once you have your screen shots, add them to your project in the Project Admin part of your site, under Feature Settings. There’s a “Manage” link next to Screen Shots, where you’ll add screen shots via a standard file upload form.
If your project is using SF Allura, it’s under Admin -> Screenshots.
Try to get screenshots that feature the most colorful, exciting, or visually appealing part of your product, or which illustrate the most compelling features. The chase scene, not the credits, so to speak. And encourage the users of your product to submit screenshots if they’re doing something particularly interesting with your product.