Creating the New Get Started Experience in Windows Documentation
Developers have spoken, and we are providing a new style of Get Started topics to introduce them to the Windows 10 platform
Can old developers learn new tricks? We think so.
Recently, I’ve been working with my fellow Windows Developer Docs writer Tyler Whitney to improve our Get Started content. With the latest updates we’ve made to that area, we’re making a big bet — we think that we’ve found a way to appeal to experienced developers and give them a practical introduction to Windows 10 development.
First and foremost, we’re doing this to address user concerns. Our previous Get Started tutorials had strong 101-level instructions, but didn’t provide experienced devs much familiarity with the rest of our content set. Users caught onto this problem and wanted better information for the experienced developer who’s new to Windows 10.
We took their advice and created content that acts as a roadmap and an overview, with something we’re calling learning tracks.
Why are we changing Get Started?
For a long time, our Get Started experience centered around tutorials. Tutorials provide a specific type of instruction — they give a clear starting point, and then walk the user through adding specific lines of code to their app in a step-by-step format. A good tutorial will give a quick explanation of what’s going on and why, but it’s still a hand-holding experience with a narrow scope.
In that way, tutorials are a one-way street. If users already know what features they’re interested in and where to find the documentation, then a tutorial is an excellent piece of content. But introducing a topic through a tutorial is rarely going to encourage the user to step out of that guided experience, which is why we’re changing our focus.
Now, there are a lot of features in Windows 10.
To give a cohesive introduction to the platform in a Get Started experience centered around tutorials, we’d need a lot of tutorials. But that’s not the biggest problem — because they’re so guided, tutorials don’t give users an incentive to explore related docs. That’s fine if the user already knows where that other information is, but it doesn’t lend itself to a Get Started experience that connects a user to all the resources we have for them.
So, what’s a learning track?
While a tutorial tells a user how to solve a problem, a learning track tells a user the skills they need to know to solve a problem. This might seem a subtle distinction, but it informs all the differences in these two types of instructional topics. Our learning tracks have the following characteristics:
- They present a real-world problem in generic terms. For instance, our learning track on data binding is presented as “display customers in a list.”
- They link to existing docs, telling users what they need to find and where to find it.
- They provide code as a generic reference. These can be standalone snippets (as in our settings topic) or code that is built upon throughout the track (as in our data binding topic).
- They don’t provide step-by-step instructions. Sequential objectives are okay, but they won’t present line-by-line rundowns of code to copy and paste.
- They provide a basic entry point, not advanced information.
Once they finish a learning track, the user should have the fundamental building blocks of how to accomplish their task and all the relevant resources to complete advanced tasks on their own.
How many learning tracks are there?
As we’re launching this new Get Started experience, we’re providing four learning tracks.
We believe these four scenarios have universal appeal to developers, as they deal with features that are foundational to many apps. And we hope any developer who investigates one scenario will be interested in checking out the rest for a more thorough introduction to the platform.
What else did we do to Get Started?
If you’ve been keeping a close eye on our Windows 10 dev docs, you might have noticed that we changed the Get Started landing page a couple months ago. We’ve also consolidated our platform introduction, turning two separate topics into a cohesive whole. Smaller changes have happened as well, and we’re still cutting extraneous information to provide a more streamlined experience.
To go with these learning tracks, we’ve also revamped our start coding page. This page links to the new topics we’ve created, replacing a long list of features with a quick orientation. We hope these changes provide an intuitive new experience, one that tells users what they need to know while helping the rest of our docs shine.
What are we doing next?
In coming weeks and months, we’ll listen to data and feedback. We’ll create more learning tracks to round out our content set, and we’ll revise the ones we’ve already made. We’ll keep their total number below a dozen — having too many runs the risk of overwhelming devs and scaring them away. Keep an eye open on the start coding page and on our What’s new topics for information on our latest additions.
Through all these changes, the Get Started experience will continue to be revised and improved. And through it, we’ll ensure that new Windows 10 developers gain practical experience and can find the information they need to create great apps.
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