Once Upon A Trailhead

A narrative account of technical storytelling

This blog post is part of the Trailhead content creator series. Follow The Trailblazer publication to read the entire series.

I’d been up all night. It was really bugging me that I couldn’t figure it out.

“Do something different,” our editor-in-chief advised. “You have to take risks.”

What did that mean, though? I was writing about a feature that was as exciting as generating log lines from an API. Oh wait, that was exactly the feature I was writing about.

So now I was lying in the dark, the pangs of an all-nighter headache setting in, frustrated and clueless as to how I was going to turn something built to be bland into something fun enough to make its home on Trailhead.

How was I going to turn something bland into something fun enough to make its home on Trailhead?

At work a few hours later, I nursed a cup of coffee and stared woefully at my calendar. I only had a couple of days left to finish the first draft of my module, and all I had to show for myself were some notes in a Google Doc.

It was at that instant that I glanced over at my deskmate Mysti, a veteran technical writer by day and crime fiction author by night. My eyes lingered on her screen for a moment. She was in the process of signing up for something called Writers’ Police Academy.

“What’s that?”

“Oh, it’s kind of a retreat for crime writers. We work with police for a couple days to understand how they actually solve crimes so we can write more realistically.”

For a brief moment I mourned the fact that I would never, ever be as cool as Mysti. But once that moment passed, an enormous smile covered my face. I skimmed my notes, searching for one line in particular.

Use case: data leakage (e.g. user exports report and takes it outside company)

I’d read that line probably a thousand times, but I’d never thought about how that use case would play out for a customer. It was a totally realistic scenario: A salesperson is fired, feels bitter about his termination, and decides to take some of his ex-employer’s Salesforce data with him to his next job. Perhaps a report full of super-secret leads? An action that would only be discoverable by an admin investigator who was using my feature? It was all adding up.

At the time, Trailhead was still in its infancy. Incorporating a detective narrative into a technical piece, or any creative narrative for that matter, was a risky move.

But I’d been told to take risks. The use case and the story blended together and the writing came easily so I committed to it.

The result of my efforts was the Event Monitoring module. It was a short module at only three units, but it took readers through an end-to-end criminal investigation using the feature’s capabilities. People learned about event monitoring in a way they never would have from reading the API reference or developer doc. Instead of seeing event monitoring as a collection of objects and fields, they saw it as a valuable tool that they could use to unearth clues and solve mysteries in their org.

Something that’s really interesting about stories is that they engage multiple parts of your brain. Whenever you read something, whether it’s a table of API limits or a Trailhead module, your brain decodes the language into meaning. But when you throw a story into the mix, your brain gets a real workout. To interpret a story, the areas of your brain that control memory, emotion, and sensation all light up.

To interpret a story, the areas of your brain that control memory, emotion, and sensation all light up.

All this activation gives your brain context for what you’re reading. You find ways to relate to the characters, situations, and feelings presented in the story. As a result, you internalize the information more effectively than you would if you just read the facts.

But the best part about stories isn’t that we learn from them. It’s that we like them.

We can’t wait to tell our friends about the crazy thing that happened to us over the weekend. We sit on the edge of our seats as our book’s plot draws to a close. A good story, whether we’re telling it or hearing it, brings us joy. So it’s no mystery why we use stories in Trailhead. It’s elementary, really.

Interested in learning more? Come to our session at Dreamforce and learn how to write the Trailhead way.

How to Write the Trailhead Way

• Tuesday, October 4; 2:30–2:50pm PT
• Moscone West, Admin Meadow Theater

Can’t make it in-person? The session won’t be streamed, but we’ll be posting the materials afterward on the Success Community in the Trailhead group.