FINISHED Planning of the platformOS Documentation Site

Date

January - April 2018

Goal

To fulfill the strategic role our documentation plays in the adoption and use of platformOS, we approached the development of our docs with a mindset that ensures that:

• Our community gets the most out of our documentation as early as possible.
• We receive feedback as soon as possible.
• We never lose sight of our long-term goals.

Method

We used the user-centered, solution-based Design Thinking method. We seek to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems, and create innovative solutions to prototype and test. This process reframes these problems in human-centric ways and allows designers to focus on what’s most important for users. The method consists of 5 phases— Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test.

Results

At the start, we explored our audience, our documentation needs, and identified both existing and missing content through in-depth interviews and workshops. In Design Thinking terms, this was the Empathize phase. Then, we defined personas and our Content Inventory (Define) and shared our ideas for content and features through a Card Sorting exercise (Ideate). Based on our findings, we created a sitemap and prioritized content needs. Layouts, wireframes, and content production (Prototype and Test) started based on the results of our discovery phase.

Read more about the process in our four-part article series: Building Our Documentation Site on platformOS