We’re working on our latest online training course, which is about post-writing and revising technical documentation, and we’re looking for examples of bad content we can use for the course exercises. If you know of anything we could use, please let us know by email.
Cherryleaf Blog
Have Amazon, Dropbox, Microsoft and Google got their information design wrong?
On an API documentation course we ran for a client yesterday, we showed a number of developer documentation websites, including ones from Amazon, Dropbox, Google and Microsoft. One common theme the delegates noticed was these sites contained a in-page table of contents, or a set of related links, on the right hand set of the screen. You will… Read more »
Documentation as an API – the docsbot
In a recent presentation, Twilio’s Jarod Reyes and Andrew Baker mentioned their plans to make Twilio’s developer documentation available as an API. They plan to start with an API for code samples, stored in a github repository. Making documentation available as an API means means users can create or remix their own versions of the documentation. For example, they could… Read more »
Customer Journey Mapping and technical communication
A technical communicator’s lot is usually to create content for helping users, and, if they are lucky, do some user testing of it in order to make future improvements. It is not that common for them to be able to look at the bigger picture and think about how the user gets to that information… Read more »
Research into how API documentation fails
There isn’t a great deal of research into API documentation, and the factors that make API content good or bad. Here’s some of the papers we’ve found so far: How API documentation fails. Research by Uddin and Robillard, McGill University, 2015. Creating and Evolving Developer Documentation: Understanding the Decisions of Open Source Contributors, Dagenais and Robillard, 2010…. Read more »