Need to Reboot Your Content Creation Strategy?

Start with "No"

Keith Boyd

Microsoft Corporation

About me

• 14 years at Microsoft, all in technical content.• 12 years in management.• 2000-2013 Windows writer and manager• 2013-present Principal Director, Content Services

and International (CSI) in the Cloud & Enterprise division (Azure, Visual Studio, .NET)– Team owns roughly 10 million content assets as well

as the MSDN print and online magazine.• Past-president, Western WA University Alumni

Association.@Keith_Boyd #LavaCon

Staffing vs. platform growth

XP

Vista

Windows 7

Windows 8/8.1

With each release of Windows, the dev platform grew in size-- most dramatically during Windows Vista and Windows 8 development…

XPVista

Windows 7Windows 8

Windows 10

0

50

100

150

200

250

300

350

400

450

500

Programming-Writer population at Microsoft

… while staffing actually *decreased*, somewhat dramatically (values are approximate).

Thousands of topics

Millions of topics

@Keith_Boyd #LavaCon

Why did staffing shift so dramatically?

• Before 2005 there were very few sites detailing how to build Windows apps, services, or drivers.

• As market forces changed, the balance of personnel investment also changed.

• Technical communicators failed to consistently demonstrate their value relative to other disciplines.

• Microsoft didn’t need scribes, it needed SMEs.

@Keith_Boyd #LavaCon

Content innovation vs. fundamentals

High

Low High

$$Too expensiveto be practicalfor most teams

Untenable – no team would acceptresults at this level

Innovation

Fundamentals

Most content teams at Microsoft fell somewhere on the red line, generally doing neither fundamentals or innovation well. No wonder staffing suffered. What to do?

@Keith_Boyd #LavaCon

Win8: four principles

In order to maximize resources and deliver greater value, we adopted four principles:

1.Less is more

2.Code first

3.Embrace a modern voice and tone

4.Be data driven

@Keith_Boyd #LavaCon

PRINCIPLE: LESS IS MORE

Too much content obfuscates and dilutes the important stuff

The painful truth…

3 primary reasons people come to MSDN:1. To get the bits, or to provision an account.

2. To “Get Started” quickly with a product or service.

3. To get help when they’re stuck.• Almost no one *wants* to read the content that

my team produces.• And absolutely no one wants to read a 2000

word conceptual overview when they’re in the middle of coding (much less a 100 page whitepaper!)

@Keith_Boyd #LavaCon

Minimally viable content

• Historically, we tried to anticipate everything a dev might need, and produced it.

• That lead to bloat, since content was created speculatively; not based on articulated customer need.

• Ironically, right when we started to learn about how customers were actually using our products, we shifted attention to the next version, and began the speculative cycle all over again.

For Windows 8, we built minimally viable content for use on day 1, then paid closer attention to how customers actually used our content so we could flesh it out later.

@Keith_Boyd #LavaCon

What is minimally viable content for the dev audience?• It covers all the basics:

– What the product is, and why you’d want it.– How to acquire it.– How to get started, quickly.– API reference, at baseline standards of quality.– Code samples for key APIs (not necessarily every API).– Breadth information about the features that comprise the

product or service.• What it’s not:

– A compendium of every imaginable scenario associated with the product.

– An exhaustive, inclusive reference section with deep details.

– Comprehensive guidance detailing every feature in the product or service. @Keith_Boyd #LavaCon

vNow vs. vNext

Adopting a “minimally viable” approach lets

your team support users on current

products/services better, while still

building a viable doc set for day 1

Keeping these forces in balance is critical to our content strategy – after all, it’s the current version of the platform or service that actually

pays the bills.

vNow

vNext

@Keith_Boyd #LavaCon

Reimagining capacity planning

With Windows 8, we centralized content planning. We did this because…

– Not all features or scenarios are created equal.– Not all writers (or leads!) are as good at evaluating the

relative value of investing in one area against another.– Nearly all writers said “yes” when negotiating with their

feature teams (the “scribe” mentality).

By doing this, we started every milestone assuming that new content didn’t meet the bar for inclusion (“No!”). Then we let the writer or scenario owner talk the leadership team into it. @Keith_Boyd #LavaCon

Deliberate collaboration

Data/BI

Content Engineering

Developer Evangelism & Support

Content

Experience

Content Team

Site ManagementProduct MarketingKey scenarios; campaigns; premium content; SEM

Scenario flows; content discoverability (SEO); metrics;project management;presentation; organization

Content goals, plans and scenarios; execution; IA

Product Team

Customer advocacy; user stories; competitive insights

Well defined roles helped us work together more effectively to create better content experiences across the customer’s journey.

@Keith_Boyd #LavaCon

Enabling customer contribution

Content teams at MS have been reluctant to embrace a more “open” content platform. But times are changing:

• Resourcing constraints are forcing our hand.• In the “real world”, software and content are

built side-by-side, in collaborative fashion (think GITHub).

• Devs know more about their code than writers.

In response, multiple initiatives incent customer participation in content:• Curah! curation platform.• Soon: Collaborative documentation and better 1st and 3rd party community

integration.

@Keith_Boyd #LavaCon

PRINCIPLE: CODE FIRST (EMPATHY SECOND)

When a developer is stuck, they don’t want to read, they want code.

(Re)Building customer empathy

The leadership team recognized that the longer someone worked at Microsoft, the less customer empathy they exhibited. There are a number of reasons for that:

• Not enough hours in the day to continue to “dabble” with the technology.

• Passion gets extinguished – “it’s just a job”.• Loss of perspective due to assimilation into the

Microsoft culture.

We gave writers so much to do that the skills and attributes that made them such great hires in the first place slowly withered away! How could we rekindle their passion?

@Keith_Boyd #LavaCon

Embracing code first…

Answer: write code. 25% of a writer’s total capacity was reserved so they would:

• Gain firsthand knowledge of the platform, from the developer’s perspective.

• Write more code snippets, which improved the underlying reference content.

• Spend more time in small development teams building end-to-end samples and solutions (real world development)

• Test our content – when they were coding and got stuck, the rule was they had to use our docs.@Keith_Boyd #LavaCon

Benefits of Code first

• A happier and more productive team. Writing code is fun!

• More complete and accurate documentation. Bugs were filed when we found omissions or errors.

• Deeper customer empathy. We developed unique insights of value to peer teams.

• Additional end-to-end and feature level samples. This raised our profile among the other engineering teams and executives.

• Better content. We knew firsthand what content devs needed to be successful, because we had walked a mile in their shoes.

@Keith_Boyd #LavaCon

Acknowledge when things are hard, and engage your customers in a more humane, straightforward, and empathetic way.

PRINCIPLE: MODERN VOICE AND TONE

Plain English instead of jargon from logic or math or whatever that is write it in plain English and tell me why the copy function does not work in this situation your language of explaining is very difficult to understand in plain english!!!! Plain English would be great speak plain English as we’re not all geeks. Try plain English and only give me the information I request. I need plain English with simple examples!!! Plain English please. Plain English so us non comp literates can understand. It was so over my head….geesh guys. Make it Plain English. Tell me in plain

“Plain English please!!!!”

I am a business analyst on an IT team, and I’m

offended by how unfriendly your help

is.

@Keith_Boyd #LavaCon

The Tao of Microsoft Modern voice

“You’re trying to take something that can be described in many, many sentences and pages of prose, but you can convert it into a couple lines of poetry and you still get the essence.”

Satya Nadella

Microsoft CEO

@Keith_Boyd #LavaCon

Voice principles

• Customer Intent. What are they really trying to do?• Focus on the intent. Make the most common task

ridiculously easy to find.• Easy to scan. Use formatting, art, headers, etc. to help

readers find what they are looking for.• Write concisely. Try to cut the length by half. • Word choice. Use everyday words. Use technical words

when they’re the right words. • Read aloud. Give it a natural, efficient voice. • Empathy. Acknowledge the reader’s situation.• SEO: Assume they’re coming from search.

@Keith_Boyd #LavaCon

From this:Traditionally, many web developers have used browser detection in an attempt to provide a consistent experience between browsers. The typical implementation performs a single comparison operation, usually involving the user-agent string, and then makes several design assumptions about the features supported by that browser. In practice, however, feature detection has proven to be a more effective technique that requires less maintenance.

This article shows how to use feature detection to verify support for standards-based features and demonstrates different ways to detect features effectively. (83 words)

To this:Many web developers use browser detection to determine what’s supported in a given browser. However, feature detection has proven to be more effective and requires less maintenance. Let’s look at this in more detail, including how to detect features effectively. (40 words)

Voice example

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Destroy. All. Robot. Language.

modify changeperform doattempt try

terminate endnavigate go

image picturetoggle switchobtain get

configure set upexecute runresolve fixenable allow

halt stopvalue number

before|after

Use simple words

Copyright © 2014 Microsoft Corporation. Do not reproduce without permission. @Keith_Boyd #LavaCon

Before/After

Sidebar: Who knew that Steve Ballmer actually aspired to technical communications?

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PRINCIPLE: BE DATA DRIVENThere’s only so much quality content we can produce. Produce the right resources; not everything you can think of.

API Documentation at Microsoft

API (Application Programming Interface) reference documentation represents 80+% of the content produced and maintained by my team. Why?• Corporate and regulatory regimes designed to enable

interoperability.• 30 years of Windows, and a commitment to backwards

compatibility.• Ubiquitous market position that compels us to make our

products and services as flexible as possible.

While 80+% of our content is reference, every API isn’t created equal…

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The long tail…

1 4 7 10 13 16 19 22 25 28 31 34 37 40 43 46 49 52 55 58 61 64 67 70 73 76 79 82 85 88 91 94 97 100

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Percentage of views

For Microsoft developer content projects, the top 1% of topics account for 50% of all page views, while the top 10% account for 90+%. The “long tail” starts after that. 90% of our content is hardly ever viewed!

@Keith_Boyd #LavaCon

The new approach

With Windows 8 RTM, we documented all APIs to a minimally acceptable level of completeness. • We then took the calculated risk to wait, to

determine which APIs were actually being used.• To avoid small sample size, we reviewed data in

monthly intervals.• By month two we had sufficient data to

determine which APIs were being used most.

Keeping a close eye on the data allowed us to say “no” to unnecessary work.

@Keith_Boyd #LavaCon

Keeping an eye on the competition

Knowing where you stand relative to competitors is a powerful tool.• We reviewed key competitor sites and experiences

in quarterly increments.• Small teams scored each site across 30 dimensions.• Ratings were inherently subjective, but normalized

at in-person discussions.• We then reviewed our own site.

Key findings were cataloged, and shared with partners. When executives or others asked “How does Apple do that?” we had the answer.

@Keith_Boyd #LavaCon

CONCLUSION

Key learnings

• Don’t be a team of scribes. Be a team of SMEs.• Keep innovation and fundamentals in balance.• Remember that almost no one *wants* to consume technical content.• Embrace minimally viable principles, then gather data and improve.• Intentionally balance your investment between vNow and vNext.• Hold a high bar for new work.• Collaborate with related disciplines intentionally.• Embrace outside help and curate where possible.• Empathy drives SAT and helps your team anticipate customer needs.• A great code sample is worth more than 1,000 words.• Be concise, and write in plain English.• Use data to invest in the right content, not everything you can think

of.• Knowing your competition gives you power – use it.

@Keith_Boyd #LavaCon

QUESTIONS?

Connect with me!

• LinkedIn• Email• MSDN Magazine• Twitter (@Keith_Boyd)• LavaCon 2012 slides (New voice, new tone, new

IA: Writing for the modern developer)• May 2014 issue of Intercom• Curah!

@Keith_Boyd #LavaCon