2016 samples
Best practices for IT teams using Jira Service Desk
On the surface, technical writing seems straight forward. But, deeper down, a technical writer relies on a long list of skills to be successful (information architecture, accessibility, content strategy, stakeholder relations–the list is endless).
One of our most important skills is product and domain knowledge. Technical writers can take advice from an old saying: "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."
After I joined Atlassian, I got the opportunity to put all of my technical skills into practice. Atlassian products are notoriously complex because they can solve problems for many different industries.
In 2016, Jira Service Desk became ITIL certified. My first major project with the company was in this service management domain, where I wrote a guide teaching IT service teams how to execute their industry practice using Atlassian products.
The resulting best practice guides can get their teams off the ground and running, not just with Atlassian's products but with how they can succeed in their industry.
Check out a sample of the original best practices for IT teams using Jira Service Desk, reproduced here in plain(er) text.
Contextual help experiment
If, as an industry, we are moving online documentation towards best practices and use-case driven value statements, where does the hum-drum, step-by-step procedural belong?
In my opinion, that belongs in context of the task itself. But, I don't like working on assumptions, so I convinced our team at Atlassian to let me run an experiment.
We took a look at an app called Elevio and tested how articles could be written for "in-product" help. I wrote articles to spur help seekers to perform actions that our analysts associate with conversion and retention.
I asked, "if our customers see this content in the product, will they perform these actions at a higher rate and with more confidence?"
The answer is overwhelmingly yes.
Read our experimental results (in all their scrappy, unreviewed glory).
This humble experiment, born from a hackathon, began a three year journey for me. The idea has reshaped how all Atlassians content designers write, structure, store, and deliver documentation.