Kate sounds off on mice and iterating

The Not-Boring Tech Writer

📣 Special announcement: The Not-Boring Tech Writer team (Kate and Chad) will be at Write the Docs Portland in May. Thanks to KnowledgeOwl's sponsorship, they’ll be wearing KnowledgeOwl and The Not-Boring Tech Writer t-shirts and giving out The Not-Boring Tech Writer stickers. If you're attending WTD Portland this year, please say hi to Kate and Chad, let them know what you think of the show, and swing by the conference swag table to grab some free stickers so you can flaunt your not-boring tech writer status with the world!
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In this solo episode, Kate shares an update on her content update progress, muses about the similarities between mice infestations and docs projects, and reflects more on Kenzie Woodbridge’s interview (S3:E6) and how we choose what we work on.

Since Episode 5, I’ve continued my work to update the KnowledgeOwl Support Knowledge Base to align with major navigation and UI changes from December. I’ve now updated roughly 400 pages and reorganized a total of five Features subcategories (one more since Episode 5).

Most of note this month: I overhauled our Search documentation. This work was necessary due to new search settings and major changes to the search configuration pages. It was also the first feature documentation I wrote at KnowledgeOwl in 2018, and I’ve mostly tried to make minor tweaks to it instead of massively updating it. Thanks to some very positive feedback on the content type-inspired reorganization I’ve been doing elsewhere, I was able to make some much better content organization and substance changes.

I’m also battling a mouse infestation in my rented house, and I spent some time in this episode comparing that process to working on documentation projects.

This leads me into ruminating on the ways we can try to make the world a better, more inclusive place. I’ve been including a lot of Kenzie’s suggestions in my style guide content updates in this audit:

1. Use actual headings. (Not usually a problem in our docs, but a good review item anyway!)
2. Use sequential headings and make sure no levels are skipped. (This one does occasionally slip in, especially in older docs, so it’s been good to review.)
3. Use link text that has more meaning than "See more" or "Click here". (Again, not a steady thing, but a good review item.)
4. Add alt text to images. (Doing a lot of this!)

I like the idea that, as content creators, content accessibility is well within our area even if we don’t feel qualified as experts in it. These accessibility areas are also solid best practices for content, information scent, wayfinding, and search engine optimization. I encourage you to try these or other small, iterative improvements that will make your docs a better place to be in the next month.

Resources discussed in this episode:

• KnowledgeOwl Support KB, Search category
• KnowledgeOwl Support KB, Features category
• TNBTW Episode 5 and Episode 6

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Transcript

Kate Mueller: [00:00:04] Welcome to the Not-Boring Tech Writer, a podcast sponsored by KnowledgeOwl. Together, we explore topics and hear from other writers to help inspire us, deepen our skills and foster our distinctly not-boring tech writing community.

Kate Mueller: [00:00:24] Hello fellow not-boring tech writers! I'm Kate Mueller, and this is one of our solo episodes where I share things I'm thinking about or working on. I'm recording this episode at the beginning of March, eagerly awaiting the daylight savings time shift. I'm going to start this episode with a quick story. I promise it does relate to documentation eventually, but it begins like this: my house has mice. I've suspected this since last spring when I found an acorn stash and some plant pots I had in the basement. We rent our house and I have to go outside and around the house to get into the basement, so I don't go down there a lot. In the winter, I go about once a month to check our heating fuel levels, and I store the plant pots and patio chairs down there in the fall and bring them out in the spring. Otherwise, I don't really go down there for months at a time. After I found this acorn stash, I had some suspicions, but I didn't have a lot of evidence that these were mice. They could have been chipmunks, I don't know. Or that they were actually living in the house. I was living in this lovely state of blissful ignorance until about two weeks ago when I was taking a bath and I heard a mouse scratching around in the wall right behind my head.

Kate Mueller: [00:01:41] As a good tenant, I contacted my landlord who wanted to use glue traps to get rid of them. I have some major issues with glue traps, so for the last week or so I've been baiting live traps with really tasty things and then relocating the mice I trap to a local nature preserve. At the time of this recording, I have now relocated six mice. You might be asking yourself, Kate, why on earth are you bringing up mice on a podcast about tech writing? I do say that these solo episodes are about things I'm thinking about, and I'm definitely thinking a lot about the mice, but where is the relevance? I'm bringing it up because it's a lot like docs updates, kind of. The problem started out feeling somewhat small and not worth prioritizing, and then suddenly it wasn't small and needed to be prioritized immediately. Once I started working on it, I chose a solution that was a good solution, but ended up...