On Risk: Writers as Prize Fighters

I had a conversation last week with a coworker who always challenges me to think just a little more critically about the big picture. This time, our conversation centered on the evolution of the content discipline in software, and where people who have traditionally been writers of extensive documentation can truly provide value in a world where confusing UX means moving on to competitor solutions.

App culture changed learning

People don’t learn in the same ways they did 20 years ago. App culture changed that. When I decide I need an app for a specific purpose, I usually go find three free ones, and the one that doesn’t piss me off because it’s too confusing gets to stay on my phone.

The same thing is true of larger solutions, though the initial buy-in may be more of a hurdle than a free phone app. But even so, SaaS has the buy-in fairly low, and it’s not hard to move on. Anyone working in this industry right now is feeling the reality of modern expectations.

It’s actually kind of exciting…the innovation that comes out of times like this has the potential to drastically change what we can achieve as humans.

Where's our value as writers?

That said, where does documentation sit when people are more likely to move on than invest in learning how to navigate complex software?

Writers make good customer advocates. They think logically, they understand how broad business needs apply to specific personas, and they can easily predict where customers will stumble. When writers participate in product and feature reviews (even at the whiteboarding stage!), they’re building descriptive narratives and topic structures in their heads. It’s second nature. When their narratives break, that’s the moment when your customer moves on to your competitor. Welcome to it.

In the writing community, reactions to the concept of writers as UX partners seem to fall into two schools: A desire to shout it from the rooftops and help build better products, or a sense of loss, typically either because of a genuine love of the craft of writing and its importance as a method of solving for customer needs, or because of a distinct disinterest in UX work.

Products need the UX help that writers are uniquely positioned to provide. The investment is necessary for overall business success—you simply can’t fault leaders for making strides in that direction. But it’s also true that writing is hard, and it's not practical to expect that most people have the chops and can fill in the gaps. Both schools of thought have merit.

Writing is hard

The reason I’m writing this article is because I want to talk for a moment about that second school of thought.

It’s true, writing is hard. Good writers move their words like prize fighters, and not everyone who boxes wears the shiny belt. That said, the pride is in the craft, and the fact of the matter is that the content models we used 20 years ago didn’t always require that much of this craft. I’ve written a topic on how to save, and let's be honest: It does not take a prize fighter to tell someone how to click a button. (Side note, explaining why the complexity of saving, in some cases, sucks for customers is a different story entirely.)

Writing is hard, but we shouldn’t be using it as a crutch to keep our jobs at status quo. Our jobs need to change! People don’t need content models from the 90s. They need products that are intuitive. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for the craft of writing, but it does mean that we need to look at our consumption experiences and understand where that craft is best applied.

Crutches, and a history lesson

Back to that conversation with my coworker. We ended up talking about crutches. Not career crutches, but content crutches. Any good software writer knows that a good chunk of the content they develop is actually trying to explain parts of the product that are maybe less intuitive, or more complex than the UI can effectively get into, or that aren’t working entirely correctly but are also not high enough priority to fix in the near term.

The idea that we should be able to solve for all documentation needs through intuitive UX is na?ve and unrealistic. The need for the craft of writing is real: Sometimes you just need that crutch, and if you’re developing your products responsibly, that’s absolutely fine.

Where I think it starts to break is when you match modern, real-world content needs to the experiences where that content is surfaced.

Looking at the history here is clarifying. 20 years ago, we replaced printed manuals with online Help systems. We shipped .chms, we built websites, and we recreated those manuals digitally. It was magical at the time. Manuals had to be finished well ahead of release because they had to be printed before they could be supplied to packagers, which meant they were never 100% accurate on launch. (Ouch!) Moving to digital meant accuracy, even if it was short-lived in some cases.

Those Help systems and websites did evolve over the years, but the model remained largely the same. Place X in the product tied to Article X that told you how to do the thing in that place. Clicking the question mark brought up the digital manual Help system, with its mythical, unspoken TOC-promise of comprehensive coverage.

The experience model didn’t change, but the model we were using to write content shifted dramatically to reflect data-driven content planning. The beauty of moving from print to digital is that we now had the ability to know what customers were reading and where they were getting stuck. We had numbers, and those numbers made it easier for us to make informed, intelligent decisions about where to spend our time.

We shifted our investments accordingly, to address customer need as opposed to the requirements of legacy Help infrastructure. But a not-so-funny thing happened: Our legacy experiences didn't evolve at the same pace. And so, we became broken. Our experiences were setting inaccurate expectations of available resources. We trained our customers out of using one of our most valuable support experiences, by providing an unreliable model.

Modernizing our experiences

Between that unreliability, and the introduction of new technologies and content platforms, customers diversified in how they got answers and information. What was relatively simple became complex, interconnected, and useful.

Customer dexterity eclipsed our broken experiences and legacy models, and drove us to invest in new modalities for learning and support. It's why we're seeing the introduction of things like chatbots and direct-interaction experiences for specific, personalized answers to immediate-need questions. It's why we're putting stock in forum responses as actual content, and embracing third-party content platforms and social channels as real sources of learning.

I also think it's important to recognize that the notion of brands as the best providers of information for their own products is just not true anymore. People place their trust in all kinds of sources, and brands could do their customers an amazing service by making it easier to tell, at a glance, if a source is trustworthy.

Writer evolution

I’m not saying that traditional content—the kind that fits so well into a TOC—isn’t important, or that writers should really only be spending their time writing bot responses, providing crutches, and consulting on UX. I'm not even saying that we should abandon the notion that TOC-driven experiences are important (trust me, they are!). There is still a need for the craft that I, much like many of my amazing coworkers, love.

What I am saying is that if you’re a prize fighter, you shouldn’t settle for weekend training at the Y. Fighting to apply your craft in impactful ways is hard. You have to make tough, uncomfortable decisions that almost certainly present some level of risk. You’re probably going to have to break some rules.

Do it.

I’ve found that risks, when taken with good intentions and thoughtful planning, are often rewarded, even if they don’t work out. I’d argue it’s more risky to rest on your laurels and continue doing the same thing you’ve done for the last 20 years. Or even the last 10 years. If you can effectively explain why you’re taking the risk, and why you find it an acceptable balance for the business, you’ve made your case and you can GO.

My story

The truth is, I've been on that risky journey for a few years now. I was a writer, my responsibilities outweighed my capacity, my content set was a hot mess, and when I ran out of options for actually delivering on all of the expectations that our experiences set, I found myself thinking through some tough questions:

• What was driving me? I was surprised to find that I was more concerned with my customers actually being able to achieve their goals, than with me still having a writing job. I was confident that my writing skills would still be needed in some capacity, but I decided I needed to let go of what was comfortable so that I could look for approaches that would yield richer results.
• What did I want to create? I found that I needed to think about what kinds of things I genuinely wanted to spend my creative energy on before I could let go of what had been my bread and butter. Once I had my sights set on something new, the idea of continuing the status quo felt like a colossal waste of energy, and I was excited to power through the ambiguity that was ahead.
• Was my work actually helping anyone? The work I was doing was certainly helping some people, but I felt like my time was being spent serving my infrastructure, as opposed to serving the bulk of my customers. I made a conscious decision to stop being okay with spending my time this way, even if there were some fairly significant risks involved, so that I could advocate for change.

I'd be lying if I told you that my first instinct was to take some risks. It wasn't. My first instinct was to abandon writing altogether and try to find another role in a less-disrupted part of the company. It felt safe, it felt like I could have impact, and it felt predictable. But a funny thing happened: I learned that I kind of adored disruption and unpredictability, and on top of that, I adored the support content business. I just didn't adore the feeling of being trapped in a broken model. So, I took some pretty big risks, stopped wasting my energy, and said no. A lot. Mostly to myself.

I could've lost my job. I wasn't delivering what I was told to deliver. I had my business cases at the ready, I spent 95% of my time on work that I was confident would have the kind of impact that would drive our model forward, and I reserved maybe 5% of my time for sustaining work on my assigned products. I didn't feel scared. Yes, I could've lost my job, but it was a job that I wasn't loving, and I was a prize fighter! I had the chops to land something else, especially if my exit story was that I was trying to make large-scale change happen in a world where I could easily articulate how things were broken. I had great managers tell me that I was not at risk, and I trusted them. I had done my homework and they trusted me too.

So here's my call to action: If you know you're a prize fighter, don't settle. Rise up and help shift the model. Find your fight, or your burning building, or your vision of what's possible, and please just go. Your customers need you to take the risk and help build something better. If you're worried, or stuck, or even just uninspired, I'm here and I get it. Let's chat.