Building navigation for your doc site: 5 best practices (Broomfield)

Join us at SpotX in Broomfield for food, drinks, and the amazing Tom Johnson from the I'd Rather Be Writing blog (http://idratherbewriting.com/)! We'll be watching his presentation from Write the Docs Portland and he will be joining us live for a remote Q&A session.

6:00-6:30pm Snacks, drinks, and socializing

6:30-7:00pm Introductions and Remote Presentation

7:00-7:30pm Live Q&A with Tom Johnson (remote)

7:30-? Optional dinner and drinks at The Colorado Keg House (walking distance)

ABOUT TOM JOHNSON

Tom Johnson is a technical writer in San Jose, California, mostly writing developer documentation, including documentation for APIs. He work at Amazon Lab126 (http://www.lab126.com/), which builds the devices for many of Amazon's products (such as the Kindle, Echo, Fire TV, and more).

Tom runs a very popular and influential blog called I'd Rather Be Writing (http://idratherbewriting.com/), which focuses on technical writing. He has been named a Top Influencer in tech comm space, and he is also a co-organizer of the Write the Docs San Francisco Meetup.

ABOUT THE TALK

Although users typically arrive at doc websites in a confused and impatient state, not sure of where to find what they’re looking for, good navigation can guide them to the right answer. Good navigation anticipates users’ needs, provides links in commonly viewed places, and brings the right topic into the foreground amid hundreds of other topics.

As you build out the navigation for your doc site, follow these 5 design principles:

• Entry point. Design the entry point to your system to orient users and allow them to easily get started.

• Hierarchy. Create a hierarchical outline of the content to help users both understand and visualize the body of information.

• Modularity. Break up content into independent topics that can be viewed, understood, and updated independent of the whole.

• Progressive disclosure. Layer the information so that you don’t present everything at once but rather make some content available only at secondary or tertiary levels.

• Wayfinding. Provide navigational signposts — such as breadcrumbs and workflow maps — to help orient users as to where they are in a larger system

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Hope to see you there!

P.S. In case you can't make it, here's a link to Tom's presentation and his awesome blog, I'd Rather Be Writing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-kEmsLwPDE&feature=youtu.be
http://idratherbewriting.com/