Time: 3:00 PM
Room: ASC A
Using Diataxis to Improve Documentation Clarity and Usability
As Infinite Campus has grown and diversified its product offerings, our documentation team has been challenged by the responsibility to provide succinct, useful, and unified content to customers in a variety of roles. Our developers also struggled to create, maintain, and locate useful internal documentation.
We needed to create a consistent, scalable structure for our content to make it more usable for internal and external stakeholders. We also sought to increase the quality of the content we provide and future-proof our processes for routine maintenance and broader initiatives such as new authoring and AI technologies. To address these similar but unique problems, we are adopting an industry-standard content framework known as 'Diataxis'.
Our presentation will:
- Provide an overview of the principles of Diataxis. This framework focuses content creation on the goals of the learner, dividing content into four basic types of Tutorials, How To, Explanation, and Reference. Other products that use Diataxis for their documentation include Ubuntu, OpenStack, and Kubernetes.
- Discuss our journey and successful implementation of Diataxis for our internal, developer-focused documentation wiki.
- Describe our current efforts and challenges to standardize and convert our existing customer-facing content to this framework.
Nate Miller
Senior Content Creator
Infinite Campus
Nate Miller has over 15 years of experience as a technical writer, developing learning content for a student information system and documenting, building, and curating a repository for internal development-focused documentation at Infinite Campus.
Katie Pimlott
Senior Content Creator
Infinite Campus
Katie Pimlott has worked for nearly 15 years creating learning content for teachers who use Infinite Campus. As a technical writer, Katie enjoys the puzzle of learning how something works and then finding an engaging and efficient way to explain it.