Kate sounds off on “good” documentation

The Not-Boring Tech Writer

In this solo episode, Kate shares an update on her content update progress. She also reflects on Nick Graziade’s interview (S3:E12) and Liz Argall’s interview (S3:E13) and the ways these interviews highlight some elements of “good” docs experiences.

I’ve continued my work to update the KnowledgeOwl Support Knowledge Base to align with major navigation and UI changes that were rolled out in December. I updated an additional 43 articles since my last episode, taking my total to 550. 🎉 I’m in the middle of updating our Contextual Help Widget documentation—one of the features I’ve been putting off updating—and I’ve been drafting content for our forthcoming AI Chatbot feature, too.

Nick and I share a tech writer villain origin story of absolutely adoring LEGO documentation, and it’s gotten me curious how many other tech writers also have this early exposure to documentation. And for some reason I’m seeing tech writing everywhere. I share a detailed story of Bont Cycling’s online shoe fit guidance, which I recently used and which has created a fairly positive product experience for me. Good documentation experiences can help create good product experiences.

I also reflect on Liz’s comment that “The best fertilizer is the gardener’s shadow.” She talked about this in the context of just showing up to work on docs, but I extend that metaphor to say showing up working with care. I gave two examples of this. I’ve been struggling with some personal losses, so a lot of my docs work lately has been a blitz of low-hanging docs fruit: a lot of small changes and improvements. None of these updates are substantive, but they’re good iterative improvements and they helped me get back into docs work. I also share a story of building a long-procrastinated-on bench for my entryway, which was more about accepting good rather than great just to get something built. Good docs are dynamic and iterative–they may not be perfect at first, but they’re constantly improving and always striving for a better reader experience.

Resources discussed in this episode:

• Our new merch store!
• KnowledgeOwl Support Knowledge Base, especially the Contextual Help Widget documentation
• Bont Cycling Shoe Size Finder (The docs I referenced in the episode are hyperlinked in the Print Sizing Page section.)

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