This is a sample I created using content from a much larger documentation suite. The original content was created in Atlassian Confluence, but I have repurposed it as Flare HTML5 online help.
To see the content, download the zip file, unzip it and open the Default.htm file in your browser.
User research
For this project, I didn’t have access to customers and there was no customer support system to wean information from. Instead, I sought out customer-facing staff and asked about their experiences with customers and also their personal experiences with the product.
The customer-facing staff included sales people, project managers, and the engineers who went on site to install and maintain the system.
The main findings were that customers needed to know how the system would alert them to on-site situations and what response they should take. They also needed to understand what responses the system could respond to automatically and what would happen in emergency situations.
Challenges
The biggest challenge on this project was dealing with the cloud version of Confluence and a plug-in that didn’t work properly. I worked with another technical author on the project and we used the plug-in to create reusable pieces of content. It worked fine at first, but a couple of months in, and the reusable parts stopped loading. The plug-in was not working properly and so we had to copy and paste to rectify the situation.
We were both involved in daily stand-ups with the developers and worked in the software team, so were kept up-to-date on product changes. The internal communications were good.
Result
Sadly, the project ended abruptly as there were some sort of funding or partnership issues that led to layoffs. But what we had created seemed to be working well and there was positive feedback coming from internal staff and those that worked with customers.
