How to Write for People That Don't Read & Benefits of Reactive Documentation

Fastly (http://www.fastly.com/) has graciously invited us to host our meetup in SoMa. Plan on showing up around 6:30, and talks will commence at about 7pm on November 6th!

We're stoked to present two great speakers. Kevin Burke (https://kev.inburke.com/) builds great experiences evaluating VR usability at Twenty Milliseconds (http://www.twentymilliseconds.com/). Greg Koberger (https://twitter.com/gkoberger) is the founder of ReadMe.io (https://readme.io/), a platform for collaborative documentation.

Kevin Burke (https://kev.inburke.com/): How to Write Documentation for People That Don't Read

Most documentation is written as as if users read every word. Yet usability researchers have known for years that people don't read things word by word - they scan pages for the content they want.

If your users can't make heads or tails of your documentation, they won't ever get started with your project, or they'll ask questions over and over that you'll get tired of answering. We'll examine usability research about how users read (hint: they don't), look at several different ways your documentation is failing busy users, and the lessons we've learned from user testing with Twilio customers. We'll also investigate how users find (or fail to find) your documentation, and the importance of clear writing in other areas, like your error messages.

Greg Koberger (https://twitter.com/gkoberger): Benefits of Reactive Documentation

Reactive documentation morphs and changes based on who the user is, and what their most recent actions were. For example, if many users get a particular error, the documentation can surface a way to fix it. Documentation can also be organized automatically, depending on how people use the product.

We'll discuss innovative examples of reactive documentation.