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Dev Wiki

Saving Tableau developers time with organized, usable, and reliable engineering documentation.

Problem

Internal wiki documentation of software development practices at Tableau was in need of a refresh. Topics were documented in multiple places and not up to date, slowing down developers when they were onboarding, configuring re-imaged machines, or changing projects.

Goal

Organized, accurate, single source of truth documentation for engineering workflow processes and configurations easily found by browse or search with the ability to monitor quality to keep it up to date over time.

My role

I was the Team Lead and worked with a Technical Writer and Infrastructure and Product Developers to write the documentation.

I played a wide range of roles: Program Manager, Data Analyst, Information Architect, Visual Designer, User Researcher, Front-End Developer, Technical Writer, and Content Strategist.

Timeline

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Simplifying wiki space categories

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Initially the Development wiki had a space for all team documentation and a number of topical spaces. The number of pages in the team space was on track to soon exceed the wiki software recommendations and breaking it up was a requirement.

I tested different simplified topical arrangements with a card sort but users found them confusing. Few of the pages tested had strong agreement on what category they belonged in, with most pages being sorted into three or four different categories. I decided to radically simplify the topical categories into two, Learning and Communities, and centralize engineering workflow documentation in the Learning Space.

Browse the Learning space

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Centralizing documentation needed by engineers across different teams into the Learning Space made it easier to use and manage. It resolved confusion over where cross-team documentation could be found and made it possible to search that official collection separate from less reliable team-specific pages.

I custom coded new landing pages that facilitated discovering new and popular information based on analysis of space traffic and a feedback survey to monitor page quality.

Browse a section

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Documentation usability

I chose topics to update based on user research and developer personas to have the greatest impact. While we re-wrote the documentation, I also created a style guide that we implemented to make pages easier to find and use.

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  1. SEO to ensure the official page appeared in the top three search results making it easy to find and reduce wasted click throughs.

  2. Topic navigation for multi-page topics make it easy to get an overview and jump between pages.

  3. The table of contents provides an overview of the page and a way to skip down.

  4. Contacts are available to make getting additional help faster and easier.

  5. Quick starts front-load the information needed to dive right in as many prefer.

  6. Related resources shows other popular content that is connected, making it easy to learn about interrelated subjects.

  7. Numbered steps visually signal a procedure and make it easier to follow as well as easy to locate in the page.

  8. Inline code formatting separates commands from regular text making directions easier to make sense of and easy to keep your place in.

  9. Message boxes bring attention to important tips, notes, warnings, and info.

  10. A feedback survey monitors the page health for accuracy and relevancy.

  11. The footer at the end of every page provides access to the most important generic resources to learn local terms, set up, onboard, or get help.

Results

Traffic to the Learning Space increased by 43% demonstrating that developers were discovering the documentation and finding it useful. In survey responses, developers rated the updated documentation helpful 89% of the time and also high quality, an …

Traffic to the Learning Space increased by 43% demonstrating that developers were discovering the documentation and finding it useful.

In survey responses, developers rated the updated documentation helpful 89% of the time and also high quality, an average of 8.7 out of 10.

Time to set up a development environment was reduced by half.

Positive feedback

Virginia breathed new life into the internal Developer Tools documentation at Tableau. There had been a sprawling wiki of individual questions, often not updated since they were written years ago. She expertly turned Developer Tools into a one-stop shop for every question our hundreds of engineers might have about dozens of platforms, technologies, and tools.
— Software Engineering Architect
Leading the team tasked with improving the core technical docs for our engineers, Virginia crafted the significant resources and guides we needed. Most importantly, she engaged with a broad cross-section of developers to ensure the most complex aspects of the workflow, build, and process were covered to the finest detail. Within my team of sixteen engineers, I could see the clear boost of having this information right at hand and easy to navigate: the gripes about missing and incomplete workflow information disappeared.
— Principle Member of the Technical Staff
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