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Pairing with Designers to create a seamless

user experience

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Intro

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• Atlassian has a very strong Design team• Traditionally, tech writing has played a very traditional

role

• There was opportunity to work together, as these teams have the same basic goals

Some background

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Bringing UX to docs

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Atlassian design principles

• A few of our design principles: • Be familiar

• Grow with me

• Give me clarity

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• Almost any UX principle you encounter can be applied to documentation

• Android

• Mac OSX

• Facebook

• Designers are great at working toward UX principles, so they can be helpful in evaluating how well a document meets them too

Looking at the docs as part of UX

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• What role is a feature targeting?

• What is assumed skills/background, etc.

• How do we best reach a certain type of user?

• What are their preferences? Their fears?

Audience/Persona

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Data and measures

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• Realization! Designers have access to lots of customer information!• Customer interviews & site visits

• Usability tests

• Usage information on existing features

• Long-term roadmap

Leveraging siloed data

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• Piggybacking usability testing• Do we need documentation?

• If so, what are the FAQs?

• Piggybacking analytics results

Measuring success

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Borrowing design techniques

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• Empathy maps help bring focus on the user

• Use them to workshop how a user might feel in a “before and after” situation

• Work backward from the “after” situation

Workshopping: Empathy maps

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• Great for moving ideas around

• Great for separate -> collaborative brainstorming

• Cheap, mobile, fun

Invest in Post-its

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• Basically a critique session• Brings group thinking into design

and planning• A check that the goals have been

met with the prototype

Workshopping: Sparring sessions

Goals of sparring sessions:

To assure design quality by critiquing design early and often

To drive towards outcomes/decisions quickly

To keep each other in the loop and learn from each others approaches and products

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• Prior, a TW sends out: • The draft to discuss• A list that covers the

goals of the document

Sparring with TWs

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• Timebox, timebox, timebox!• If your team is given to negativity, try a positives-only 5

minutes• Try to make sure everyone is heard - using a checklist

or give everyone 1 minute to list feedback• Leave with at least 3 action items

Tips for running a sparring session

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• 6-ups drive focus on ideal solutions

• Get you out of “word-thinking” • Good way to build on each

others’ ideas

Workshopping: 6-ups

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• How does a user get to a feature? • Controlled process?

• From many different areas with different goals?

• What does a user do before? • What does a user usually do

next?

Workshopping: User stories

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• Use colored stickers to “vote”

• Build out your doco plan based on the problem areas

Taking user stories to the next level

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How we made this happen

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• Look for a team that finds value in Design and Tech Writing

• Look for a Designer who sees the value in docs

• Look for a new project that’s running lean and has some momentum

• Look for projects that are data-driven

Find the right projects

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• Check out some design principles

• Read about design techniques• Follow some UX blogs• Write a documentation

experience plan

Explore & expand

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• cburwinkle@atlassian.com• Christine Burwinkle on LinkedIn

Contact me

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