2020 samples
This was the year to get over some of the fear and distrust I have in conferences. To address my personal growth, I set a goal of writing and delivering talks to two international conferences.
I was lucky enough to share my work and give some advice about the practical side of our work at Utterly Content and Write the Docs conferences. I wanted to demystify the abstract and theoretical aspects of content design by presenting case studies from my recent work at Atlassian.
Early signals for better designed content (27:10, 520MB)
Writing UI/UX content can be a challenge, especially when the stakes are high. Luckily, design practices are making their way into writing content. Get an introduction to early signal testing and learn about some content-led tests that can help you build confidence in your product’s messaging. Learn more about tree testing, information architectures, exploring terminology preferences through surveys, and investigating recognition and recall to help name new concepts. All these tools can help you predict how your customers will comprehend the experiences you’re designing.
Content strategy in practice: A case study (35:32, 671MB)
Big companies have big content problems. With tens of thousands of pages, big companies may put too much pressure on their customers to find the exact content they need. And, that’s bad for business. After three years of experimentation, Atlassian’s Sam Irons, Lead Content Designer, shares some real-life lessons on how to provide the right content to the right person at the right time. You’ll walk away with ideas and techniques for scaling content in step with your growing organization, including the standards, emerging technologies, and content practices that have helped Atlassian customers summit a steep product learning curve, and help a large business learn to love content strategy.
A deep dive into concept writing
In 2019, I launched a contextual, in-product help experience in Jira. To judge its success, we analyzed our reader's behavior hoping that more relevant content changed how they used our products.
We observed an unexpected insight from our analysis–that helpseekers viewed conceptual writing as more helpful than task-based procedural writing.
In 2020, I took on a task of making sure our conceptual documentation was up to scratch and spent some time picking apart conceptual content. In the end, I wrote a piece for our writing staff at Atlassian that dissected two pieces of concept writing: an article that performed very well (mine!), and an article that performed very poorly (also mine!).
What I learned bolstered our existing content standards guidance and provided writers a rubric to help them evaluate their own conceptual writing. And, it was extremely fun for me to deeply analyze a niche of technical writing.