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Recording of Let's Tell a Story -- Scenario-Based Documentation, by Matt Ness (STC Silicon Valley Presentation)

by Tom Johnson on Sep 2, 2016
categories: technical-writing • podcasts

Matt Ness, a technical writer at Splunk and a co-organizer for WTD San Francisco, recently gave a presentation to the STC Silicon Valley chapter called Let's Tell a Story: Scenario-Based Documentation. In this presentation, Matt talks about ways to integrate storytelling techniques into documentation, drawing upon his experience as a Dungeons and Dragons player and his player experience from other video game or fantasy worlds. To help users on their journeys and quests, you need a narrative to guide them and a manual to help them overcome obstacles. Video, slides, and audio from the presentation are included in this post.

Presentation description

Here’s the description of Matt Ness’ presentation, “Let’s Tell a Story: Scenario-Based Documentation”:

To new users, complex software products can seem like dark woods on a stormy day. As tech writers, we often spend a lot of time talking about the overall shape of the forest and the variety of paths within it (conceptual docs), creating detailed catalogs of local tree species (reference docs), and providing step-by-step guides to things like “how to cross a river” or “how to knock on a door” (task-based docs).

But none of that helps your customers when they just want to know how to get to Grandmother’s house, without getting lost in the forest, falling into the river, and accidentally going to the other cabin in the woods, where the lycanthropic senior citizens live.

In other words, your customers need a narrative. And maybe they need lots of them. When you’re dealing with products that can be run and configured in a bewildering variety of ways, a single getting started manual might not do the trick. It’s like giving people a Choose Your Own Adventure book and only allowing them to choose one path through to the end.

For my talk I’ll explain how we became aware of the need for better scenario-based documentation, and how we ended up building a prototype during a hack week project. Now we’re on our way to creating a collection of short stories that show users how to string sets of features and procedures together to solve complex problems. We’ll cover some of the things we’ve learned along the way and offer best practices for those who want to tell a few stories of their own. (Read more details at STC Silicon Valley chapter)

Video

You can watch a video of the recording here:

Audio

If you just want the audio, here it is:

Listen here:

Slides

You can view the slides here:

About Matt Ness

Matt Ness is a technical writer with over twenty years of experience at places like PeopleSoft, Oracle, and Intuit. He’s currently a writer for Splunk, a leader in the machine data analytics sector.

About Tom Johnson

Tom Johnson

I'm an API technical writer based in the Seattle area. On this blog, I write about topics related to technical writing and communication — such as software documentation, API documentation, AI, information architecture, content strategy, writing processes, plain language, tech comm careers, and more. Check out my API documentation course if you're looking for more info about documenting APIs. Or see my posts on AI and AI course section for more on the latest in AI and tech comm.

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