Reporting and Insights
When I began at Box, there were a few task topics about how to run reports buried in a "How-to Guide for Admins" section. A little bit of conceptual information was mixed in with the task topics and there were no reporting reference topics.
I realized there was a huge gap here, both in how information was organized and the information available. I pulled the reporting toics out of the catch-all section and created a seaprate section for reporting. I then developed a reference topic for each type of report, development that is perhaps the most tedious in technical writing, but the content developed is the content that is both critical to good decision making by users and the content that has the greatest capability to be reused.
I also rewrote the existing task topics and added task topics for missing user tasks. FOr the reference topics, I began by putting the content into tables. I discovered, however, that the tables did not render well on mobile devices. So I developed some CSS that served two purposes:
- Put the information into semantically correct elements
- Created an experience that not only worked better on mobile devices, but made it so that terms would "stick" to the top of the viewport so that for definitions that were large, the term information would still be fisible as users scrolled.
The Admin Insights page was later entirely redisigned. It had a short, incomplete topic previously. I recognized that reporting and insights wer related concepts, so I pulled Insights into the Reporting section. I developed all of the Insights conceptual, task, and reference information, including the content patterns that I used consistently in the topics that described the various data tiles.
This is a list of topics that I developed: