Is it (layer) cake: Thinking in content levels¶
Description
“It’s levels to it, you and I know”
— Kendrick Lamar
Users visit docs to accomplish a goal. When a product is new, it’s relatively simple to construct a good docs experience with a streamlined getting started guide and a few concepts. As the product grows more complex, with added features and alternative ways of accomplishing similar user goals, the docs swell in volume to keep pace. This can lead to poor user experience of a docs site, with users being directed to deep, technical guides that don’t answer their simple questions. And when docs fail to provide the most important and relevant information to users, users get frustrated.
At Stripe, we’ve developed a simple framework that helps us develop new content and assess and revise existing content to create holistically consistent information architecture (IA) and an improved user experience. The basic idea is that we should think about three main levels of content: orientation, decision, and implementation. Each level provides a different type of information that users are likely to need at different times. Writers (and other docs contributors) should be aware of these levels as they create or reorganize the IA for new products and content. Ideally, following this framework ensures that we'll create an experience where users:
- Don't land on the wrong type of content
- Know where they are in the docs, where to go next, and how to go back if they need to
- Accomplish their goal (like complete their Stripe integration successfully) while having a surprisingly great experience
In this presentation, I’ll explain how we developed this framework, compare it to other similar frameworks, talk about how we’ve used it in our docs, and how others can start using it.
- Conference: Write the Docs Portland
- Year: 2023
