My co-worker (and fellow programmer) used to have the following tag-line on his email signature blurb: "A screenshot is worth a thousand words." And is he ever onto something there!
The backstory dates to last week when the alpha-user of "my" application sent me "before" and "after" samples of a spreadsheet that's moshed around by an Excel macro after it's downloaded from the website. Except I'm pretty sure she'd already done some housekeeping of her own, which threw off the row numbers, which really made things ugly.
To sanity-check: I stepped through the process, myself soup-to-nuts, and ended up with something cleaner that her "after" spreadsheet. So I figured her doctoring had something to do with it. So we intermittently traded "clarification" emails through the rest of the day. That actually made the situation worse, because I started to doubt that the export process from web page to spreadsheet was working properly--a.k.a. the kind of thing that you do not want to have to debug from two time zones away. Right before I headed out, however, she sent me screenshots from her stepping--also soup-to-nuts--through the process, and included a copy of the final product.
Then it all pretty much made sense. As dismaying it was to realize how far apart our respective pages were, realizing that I'd missed a few things in my smug assumption that the problem was with Excel or user error. Worst of all, we could have spent another day trading misunderstandings and unfounded assumptions.
Moral of the story: Ask for the screenshots. Have instructions written up for users who aren't used to taking them. Yeah, they're futzy and a pain. But I have yet to find them less time-consuming that guessing or projecting. That's the kind of thing that should be drilled into you in Programmer School, before you're allowed to so much as touch a compiler.
