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Rethinking Developer Personas for Technical Documentation
Who is reading your docs?
Docs can make or break a product.
Documentation is the second most important factor developers use for deciding which database to use, according to the 2022 State of Databases survey. And in an informal survey at the 2017 SciPy conference, respondents felt, on average, that developers should spend about 20% more time on documentation.
End users know docs are important. Developers know docs are important. Why does it feel like good docs are so hard to find?
In part, it’s because docs are so often organized by who the user is and not how they use documentation.
The Wrong Personas
I work for a database company. When I think about our users, I think about:
- Software engineers
- DevOps engineers
- Database admins
- Data engineers
- Data analysts
- Data scientists
…and so on.
It’s a natural approach.
But after participating in user testing sessions for our docs website, I’m convinced basing personas on roles is the wrong approach. A user’s job title…
