From Tech Writing to UX (and Back)
From Tech Writing
Nearly four years ago I started in Ataccama as a technical writer. It was a leap of faith for me, switching from business consulting, where it was “all about the client” to a completely new career and industry (SW Development). Nevertheless, I felt a calling, so I conquered my fear and applied. Long story short, I’ve loved it ever since. I was the only tech writer in the company, had no experience, and was tasked with establishing an online documentation site, moving docs from MS Word to a collaborative online platform, and developing a process for creating and maintaining documentation for all products.
To UX
Three and a half years later, I started thinking again about my career, and one morning as I was riding the metro and thinking about structuring a user guide for one of our products, I kept asking myself all these questions about who the users are and what problems they are really trying to solve with our tool. Then it dawned on me that designing intuitive user-centered products was the next thing for me. It so happened that there was a UX opening in Ataccama, so I went for it… another leap of faith.
As a tech writer and the unofficial head of documentation, I always cared about the user experience with our documentation: content, discoverability, search, and design. At the same time, I always suggested improvements to our products, with the audacious goal of making products that do not need any documentation. So moving to UX just made sense given how much I got to know the products that I documented. Switching to a design role was like shifting from a passive mindset (documenting something that exists) to an active one (creating something that doesn’t exist yet). Currently, I am still wearing two hats and I like it (minus the dire lack of time): both crunching the conundrums of creating optimal user flows and writing easy-to-read technical prose make me fired up, happy, frustrated, tired, and rewarded, as only the things that one truly loves do.
And Back
At the moment, my team is working on the new major version of our master data management platform, which brings huge changes to both the backend and frontend. Being close to product management and design, I get to know things ahead of time, which lets me plan the docs that need to be written. As a UX designer, I think and create in terms of user flows, which helps a lot when writing user guides since they are usually a collection of user flows. Now I not only document them — I create them, too!
Something for the End
This first article about my journey in UX and docs focuses on why, as a tech writer, I decided to do UX. I plan on writing more articles about how UX designers and tech writers can collaborate, my struggles in both domains, and how I approach day-to-day tasks in designing and writing.
