Writing Beautiful Technical Documentation
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Transcript of Writing Beautiful Technical Documentation
Creating Beautiful
Open Source
Technical Documentation
Or:
Writing FOSS
Docs that
Don't Suck
Technical Writing
A Fairy Tale
A long time ago
in a galaxy far
far away ...
Jane
Fred
Sue
Bob
Monday
Tuesday
Tuesday
My l337 db rawks!
Wednesday
Wednesday
My h4X0r skills are teh win!
Thursday
Thursday
My design skillz are made of awesome!
Friday
Friday
WTF?!
Friday
Friday
My l337 db rawks!
Friday
My h4X0r skills are teh win!
Friday
All users base are belong to us
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
Monday
Ship it!
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Thursday
???
Thursday
!!!
Thursday
$*!%
Friday
Dole queue
Just because you can READ a manual ...
Doesn't mean you can write one.
Happily Ever After?
Information Plan
Content Specification
Writing
Translation
&
Production
Review
Release
5 Phase Model by JoAnn Hackos
A common mistake that people make when trying to design
something completely foolproof
is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools
Douglas Adams Mostly Harmless
How To:
Write FOSS Docs that don't suck
no one reads manuals!
But ...
Why Document?
What makes your
software
awesome?
These things all work the same
for documentation
Learnability
Efficiency
Retention
Few user errors
Satisfaction
It's all about the user
Whoever they might be
When users love the software
then that's great software!
But when they don't ...
the documentation should be there to save you
Beautiful documentation won't make crappy software any better
But it might prevent some users
from trying to stab you
Lana Brindley
Red Hat Technical Writer
+61 410 500 659
@Loquacities
http://lanabrindley.blogspot.com/
