In 2022, I embarked on a journey to enhance a self-help platform (Wiki) for an IT consulting firm. The platform has since transitioned from a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to a fully developed platform. At first, I found it quite challenging in creating accessible content for layman users. However, my past experiences as a designer have helped me through those challenge. Here are some of the key challenges and strategies I employed:
Challenge 1: Merging Writing Skills and User Experience Principles
In UX design, the ‘Less is more’ principle can sometimes make it challenging to explain complex systems in a easy way for non-experts to understand. As a technical writer, we tend to describe systems in a comprehensive way, causing the loss of aesthete as whole. That is one of the reasons laypeople tend to lose patience in reading guidelines.
The challenge lies in making the content ‘understandable’ without making it overly ‘complicated’.
Challenge 2: Constructing and Organising Content
When developing a platform from the ground up, you should consider all the aspects, such as content structure, writing styles, content priority, and format pattern. All of these only serve one goal. The goal is to make the platform ‘operable’ and user-friendly.
Challenge 3: Establishing an Appropriate Mindset for Content Writing
The mindset of a writer plays a significant role in content creation. As a technical writer, I found maintaining consistency page by page can become monotonous. and explaining how things work when facing with defects or poorly designed functions can be frustrating.
However, as someone who always finishes what they start, I found my ways to go through those challenges. Here are some strategies I employed:
Strategy One: Align Your Writing Goals with the User’s Goals
At the outset, it’s important to identify the user’s goal and align it with your writing goal. For example, if you’re documenting the login/register process for your products, the user’s goal is likely to gain access to certain functions. Therefore, your focus should be on helping users understand the steps to access the systems and potential problems they might encounter. This strategy helps keep the content clear, simple, and targeted. It also makes the content “understandable” because we achieve consensus with the users by sharing the same goal.
Strategy Two: Align Your Content Structure with the Product Structure/User Story Map
If you’re creating a wiki platform, following your product’s functional structure can be beneficial. This allows users to navigate your content based on their understanding of your online product. Another approach is to construct your content catalogue based on a user story map, which is a prioritised collection of user stories. However, this could make navigation difficult if there are many user stories on the same level of hierarchy.
Strategy Three: Embrace Your Dual Role as a Writer and a UX Designer
If you consider yourself solely as a technical writer, you might find the task of writing technical information based on your understanding of the technology tedious. However, adopting the mindset of a UX designer can make the process more interesting and motivating.
Here are two tips for you:
- Seek support from management so that you are viewed more as a designer and less as a writer. This can impact your Key Performance Indicator (KPI) and provide you more motivation to think as a UX designer.
To get the best result, you should prioritise user satisfaction over the number of pages. - Identify Meta-Modules Identify meta-modules, which are basic modules that can be used in many pages or stories. For instance, you can consider the login process as a meta-module, because it is required in many other functions where users usually are required to login their account for further actions.
Properly managing these meta-modules can save you a lot of time when the function changes. If one meta-module changes, any content using this meta-module would be changed automatically. This would save you the time of changing the content of the meta-module page by page when the function changes.
References:
Google. (n.d.). Technical Writing Courses. Retrieved from https://developers.google.com/tech-writing
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/