2 posts tagged with "User Experience"

So often the SMEs we work with want to throw people into the middle of the conversation.

I was talking about Ngombor Community Development Alliance in the Write the Docs Slack recently and someone asked me what Ngombor had to do with documentation.

It was an excellent question as I'd thrown some Ngombor information at a channel without contextualizing. I'd been a terrible technical writer, marketer and organizational storyteller. What did fundraising for a community organization in Uganda have to do with technical writing? For some, it was a logical continuation of a conversation. For others it was baffling to be suddenly thrust into the middle of a conversation where they did not have the context to understand what I was talking about. In the heat of the moment, how would someone tell the difference between me and any random person trying to sell a product?

So often the SMEs we work with want to throw people into the middle of the conversation. They've been working on something for months, maybe years and they just want to display the logical conclusion. It's frustrating. I don't know how many times I've needed to help engineers understand that a little bit of context, a little bit of grounding information at the top of the doc is not patronizing, it's not unnecessarily slowing people down. Context and introductory information helps people (or machines), who are not in the middle of whatever the conversation is, access the meaning of a document. It helps people who might not have the precise words for describing their situation, find their way.

And I must laugh and pause here, and I hope you are laughing too. Most of the world doesn't really play baseball, it's not global terminology! When it comes to jargon, inside baseball is a little inside baseball!

Infodumping is when you provide a whole lot of information all at once. It's a term that's been used for some decades when critiquing literature and has been adopted by autistic communities to refer to our tendencies to excitedly enthuse on a topic.

Documentarians (aka technical writers, content champions and word nerds) are prone to this trait. In some ways technical writing is an ongoing wrestling match with infodumping as we take on vast amounts of information, process and subject matter expertise and transform it into content that can be used and understood with greater ease.

In an increasingly remote world, our non-technical writing colleagues can find our facility for writing things down a little bit overwhelming. It can be especially frustrating for technical writing when even asking questions can trigger overwhelm in others as it floods their brain with new angles and questions. We can feel stuck in a bind where we're simultaneously told to ask questions, but also please don't communicate so much!

This is why when I was putting together the Neurodivergent Quality of Life Prioritization Matrix management of over enthusiastic infodump over chat was one of the first criteria I listed.

In this blog post I share some tips and tricks I find helpful, as well as some advice from fellow Write the Docs peers. We'll never get it perfect, but perfect is never the point.