From Documentation to Information Experience
This article was co-authored by Michelle Bacigalupi (Lead Information Architect and UX Writer) and Neeraj Bhatia (Senior Director of Information Experience)
Navigating a changing landscape
The enterprise software industry has gone through several changes over the last few years. While some changes have been incremental, the transition to a cloud-based world has been significant. Rapid releases, reduced attention spans, and evolving user expectations pose several challenges and opportunities for information development teams.
This is our story of transformation, of how we are adapting and responding to a changing cloud landscape, and of how we are driving change.
Where the industry has been and where it’s going
Traditionally, enterprise software companies built monolithic products and released them every 12 or 18 months. These products were then configured and installed on servers at customer premises. As part of each release, documentation teams would create large documentation sets to support users in their engagement with the product.
This approach had several limitations. Content was largely static and had long gaps between updates. There were limitations on content formats and delivery, and on the ability to get analytics or real-time feedback from users. Documentation teams kept doing the same thing release after release, without being able to measure success or user satisfaction.
Fast forward to the connected and cloud-based world of today, and we now have the tools and resources to better understand our users’ needs and to provide them with the right information in the most appropriate format, when and where they need it. We have the opportunity to think beyond just documentation, and instead move to designing and owning the end-to-end information experience for our users.
Information Experience and our team
With that context, our team made the decision to evolve our name from Documentation to Information Experience, or IX for short. This aligns, in part, with Guidewire’s transformational journey to the cloud.
Information Experience encompasses the end-to-end journey of information acquisition, how the user experiences it, and the value that experience adds in helping users to succeed. It encapsulates user research, content design, persona-based content, information delivery in various formats, and analytics and feedback loops to measure success.
This transition included taking what we’ve learned and embracing new approaches to creating innovative forms of content. For starters, we’re using the design thinking paradigm practiced here at Guidewire. Rather than jumping to a solution, we look at projects strategically. Who are the stakeholders and end-users? What are the goals and timelines? We work collaboratively to define the problem we are solving, define success, and agree on requirements along with any resource constraints. This design thinking framework empowers us to drive projects and move them forward effectively and efficiently.
Moreover, by applying design thinking to our work, we push ourselves to experiment. Team members are learning new skills and applying these skills in new ways. Real-time analytics empower us to get direct feedback, reevaluate strategies, and quickly iterate to improve the information experience.
Reimagining how we approach content creation at Guidewire
When we embarked upon this name change, we wanted to see what opportunities would be available to us as our web technologies have become more and more sophisticated. Are there different types of content or new formats that we should be exploring? What technologies and information paradigms could we leverage to empower the end user? Keep in mind that the goal is to increase learnability, findability, and usability through improved information architecture, content organization, presentation, and other methods of delivering information.
For example, we’re exploring the use of multimedia, such as embedded microanimations, to see how the combination of text and video aids learnability.
In addition, we’re experimenting with different ways to optimize the landing pages for our product documentation. This includes identifying content categories that will be presented in the form of what we call “cards.” These cards will help the end-user focus their attention on specific topics and build their product knowledge quickly.
A large part of our user base is technical, including API developers and DevOps administrators. The developer experience continues to be a large part of our information experience strategy. We strive to create great information experiences for our technical users too, empowering them to efficiently build solutions by providing the right content at the right time — developer documentation, code samples, tutorials, and of course API references. User feedback plays an important role in helping us to achieve this goal. For example, we recently made our API references and associated documentation public, and this was in response to user feedback that we had collected.
We’ll be tracking to what extent these and other enhancements help our users to consume and understand content. As our team changes and grows, we’ve also begun to embrace new disciplines as part of information experience. This includes user experience (UX) writing and information architecture (IA). User experience writers focus on content design for applications. Information architecture, on the other hand, is concerned with how information is organized within digital products and the overarching strategy of our content.
These projects have expanded the scope of our work and provided us with new ways to think about content and create innovative information experiences.
Keeping the fire going
This is an exciting time for the Information Experience team at Guidewire. Team members are jumping in, learning new skills, and building on existing ones. As a result, new approaches are happening quickly, and projects are moving forward. All of this has led to the creation of new job roles and increased specialization in the team: UX writing, information architecture, tools development, technical documentation, and developer documentation, just to name a few.
As we evolve in this transition, we’ll continue to grow in our ability to offer content in different formats, to be flexible and adaptable to the different ways that people learn, and to push the boundaries of content design.
