Organizing a Confluence hoard, or, does this page spark joy?¶
Description
Hoarder. The word brings to mind some elderly person creeping through a dim house filled with piles of years-old clutter, not a 350-person technology department. But with more than 20,000 Confluence pages across 34 different spaces, what else would you call us?
True, you can't just blame the current team. The average page was 3 1/2 years old, and the oldest almost a teenager. A quarter of the pages had last been updated by people no longer with the company, and nearly a third of them hadn't even been looked at for more than a year.
But even if we'd inherited the problem, it was ours now. Or, more precisely, mine.
What we needed was a Confluence space that—unlike the current installation—was:
- Usable by people inside and outside of the team
- Structured to reflect our (new! evolving!) organizational design
- Tailored to users who browse and ones who search
- Populated with relevant content
Like Mari Kondo, the popular organization consultant, I've been bringing order to our informational hoarding house since autumn. In this talk, I'll discuss the information architecture thinking behind every step of the process. Not just what I did, but why, what user needs I was serving, and how. I'll discuss the clever (and not-so-clever) things we did, and explain what's left to do and what challenges I anticipate there.
- Conference: Write the Docs Prague
- Year: 2020
