Surprise! You’re a designer now.¶
Description
Anyone who’s written documentation for a living knows that our jobs are only, like, 50 percent writing, and 50 percent all the other stuff we have to do to make that writing good. Long before we ever get a word on the proverbial page, we spend ages getting our heads around our products and the underlying concepts that shape them. But how often are those underlying concepts... kind of a mess? And how much better would our lives be if we could help design our products so they’re simpler, clearer, and easier to communicate to our users?
Welcome to the wonderful world of content design. Whether you’ve ever heard of the discipline or not, it’s a safe bet that it already makes up a healthy percentage of your work. In this talk we’re going to explore how all of the systems thinking, narrative building, and language crafting you already do as documentarians can make you an incredible asset to your product design team.
As a former documentarian who’s made the jump to content design full time, I’ll share a framework we've used at Intercom to communicate the value of our role on the product design team. You’ll come away with ideas for:
- how to get involved with the product design process as a documentarian
- how to communicate the value of your input to a variety of different disciplines
- and how to make the content design you’re already doing easier for people to see, understand, and build upon
- Conference: Write the Docs PRAGUE
- Year: 2019
