Splunk® Style Guide

Splunk Style Guide

The guidelines in the Splunk Style Guide establish best practices for writing technical documentation. Search docs.splunk.com to find documentation related to Splunk products.

GIFs

You can use an animated GIF to show steps in a UI. Use an animated GIF to supplement task information or paragraph text. Don't remove essential text in favor of a GIF.

Before you create a GIF

Keep GIFs as concise as possible, and use them only when they are meaningful to your content. Consider these challenges of GIFs before using them in documentation:

  • GIFs are more difficult to maintain and more visually distracting than screenshots. If the UI changes, you must also create a new GIF in order to keep the content up to date.
  • GIFs have accessibility issues because they don't give readers the ability to pause, rewind, or skip forward.
  • It can be difficult to write meaningful alt text for moving sequences.
  • GIFs aren't useful in PDF format and can contribute to a negative reading experience if you expect customers to frequently download your documentation for security purposes.

Requirements

Ensure your GIF meets these guidelines:

  • No voiceover is required.
  • No complex annotations are required.
  • The duration is no more than 20 seconds.
  • It doesn't need the ability to pause, rewind, or skip forward.
  • It doesn't show multiple complex steps in a task.

If what you want to demonstrate requires a voiceover, is longer than 20 seconds in duration, or needs the ability to pause or skip ahead, use a video instead. See Best practices for including videos.

See the following example of an animated GIF:

The following animation shows how to add a Flow Model and launch the Explorer. The animation starts from the home page. Then, the user clicks the Add new Flow Model button. A pop-up message appears, and the user enters a name and base search for the Flow Model and clicks submit. In the Flow Model editor, the user selects customer_id under correlation ID and action under step, and then clicks Explore. The Explore view shows a flowchart of steps, starting with "new account created" and ending in "purchased game".

For guidelines on when to include and avoid using images, see Including images in Splunk docs.

Last modified on 13 November, 2024
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This documentation applies to the following versions of Splunk® Style Guide: current


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