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In our recent episode on the Knowledgebase Ninjas podcast, Iga Koprowska highlights the importance of feedback mechanisms in documentation to better understand the users and enhance documentation quality. She explores how various research methods aid in crafting effective documentation.
Watch the Video Podcast here
About Iga:
- Iga’s LinkedIn
- She qualified as a translator and joined technical writing during her final year at university.
- After a couple of jobs as a technical writer, she moved to Motorola Solutions and focused on internal documentation. She got familiar with release management, scrum methodologies, and was certified as a professional Scrum master.
- Currently, Iga serves as a Senior Technical Writer at Akamai, where she creates traditional user guides and API documentation based on Swagger.
Key Takeaways
- According to Iga, technical writers should ensure that the documentation platform includes feedback mechanisms such as upvotes, downvotes, adding comments, and suggesting edits. This allows users to submit their feedback proposals in a single view and help technical writers identify the gaps in the documentation.
- “Technical writers must regularly monitor feedback on how the users interact with the product through user communities and forums. Recurring issues can be identified through these communities and new troubleshooting sections can be drafted for the product documentation.
- They can also reach out to product managers and see what tools are being used to monitor customer interactions”, says Iga.
- “It is important for technical writers to conduct extensive research to understand what users need from the documentation. Starting with product research, browsing through project scopes and design documents can help in gathering relevant information for drafting user-oriented guides”, she adds.
- Technical writers should focus on user experience, user centricity, and research the voice and tone of the documentation to enhance its quality.
- While discussing the benefits of testing, she explains that it helps to understand the product behavior, ensure the accuracy of documentation against API responses, and collaborate with QA teams for validation against schemas.
Rapid fire with Iga
- Highly recommended resource
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Balance
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