Heidi Waterhouse

139 points
A pink-haired woman with a half-smile looks directly into the camera.
Minneapolis, MN

Heidi is a technical writer, speaker, and developer coach who is working on scaling her writing and industry expertise to help more people be better writers. Her current passions include automated documentation, docs-driven development, and sewing pockets into all her clothes.

Open Minded Author

Authored Content

Authored Comments

A pink-haired woman with a half-smile looks directly into the camera.
HWaterhouse
How do we fix the state of technical documentation?

I agree with you to a degree, but I think part of the problem may be that we are failing to motivate anyone properly. I'm going to go noodle on this in a personal blog post in a couple days.

A pink-haired woman with a half-smile looks directly into the camera.
HWaterhouse
4 steps to better documentation: How to get users the exact answer to the problem

It's certainly true that new users are sometimes unclear on how to frame their questions, Greg, but I think it's also a good time for us to slow down and make sure that we are not pre-supposing a bunch of jargon before they ca even get to ask the question.

It probably depends on the writers, the users, and the tech stack, when it comes down to it. I know that when I started using FrameMaker, I didn't even have the specialist vocabulary to ask intelligbile questions, and it took a lot of patience from the community to bring every new user up to speed.

I'd like our documentation to feel less like patience, and more like transparency. Always an ideal!

OSZAR »