This page contains the details of a technical writing project accepted for Google Season of Docs.
Project summary
- Open source organization:
- Hydra Ecosystem Documentation
- Technical writer:
- AwesomeChap
- Project name:
- Improving the UX of the doc site
- Project length:
- Standard length (3 months)
Project description
I'm writing you to express my interest in Improving the UX of the doc site Idea you posted on your season of docs idea page. I am a seasoned React Developer, Designer as well as a really enthusiastic Technical writer. I have a decent experience in working within a large multidisciplinary teams as well. Besides development, I write Technical blogs for some publications like TheStartup as well. To see my blogs you may visit https://medium.com/@jatin15011999. And if you want to know more about me you can visit my website www.jatinkumar.tech. I am positive that my experience and skill set would be a great match for this Idea.
I have more than 2 years of experience with MERN stack, and can build robust interfaces with eye catching UI and awesome UX pretty quickly. I am proficient in React & Node.js and I love to mix code with creativity. In my previous experiences I have developed variety of Front-end layouts that solved various problems. Being UI/UX designer I very well know that how much impact can a good website UI/UX can have on the visitor. It doesn't matter how much good content you might have on your website, But unless you are able to provide good user experience to the user. He/She would be less willingly to visit your website again . A good UI/UX can be as simple as changing colors or adding non intrusive animations, But to think of that simple changes you need to try out hundreds of things before finding appropriate combination and I think that I have decent amount of experience in that aspect and can accomplished it really elegantly and efficiently.
I studied Hydra's current website in great detail and am in sole agreement that the present site has a serious navigation issue. Well as stated in your idea It can be easily sorted out by addition of a sidebar / topbar to website. But If we look more closely the current site already has a navbar located at top so Topbar is out of option and Sidebar seems to be more viable fit. Also as described at ideas page some docs also need to be linked to Home section for ease of navigation. So considering all of these constraints I designed a prototype, You may see it at http://hydra-doc.herokuapp.com/. The prototype is completely responsive and has been inspired from various other documentation sites. It provides completely different User Experience when opened in Mobile as compared bigger screens like laptop. If you have seen the prototype, you might have observed that it served a landing page (which is also a About page) which has two buttons one says 'Know More"" and other ""API Docs"". So very well, it seems like that now our API Docs have been linked to main webpage and one of the problems is solved, But wait what about navigation ? Don't worry, This site offers really elegant solution for that aspect as well. If you now press 'Know More' Button, you would be scrolled down to about section of the website and I you now hop around and play with it, You would experience for yourself that how elegantly does it solve the navigation problem without compromising content visibility and User experience. In slimmer screens the sidebar hides and ensures that the content occupies the space it deserves and in wider ones where they both i.e. Content and Sidebar can co-exist, Sidebar takes some necessary space as well. Also In case user wishes to navigate to some different page, He can do that as well and that too pretty coveniently by just clicking a certain title on the nav bar located at the top of the screen. Non intrusive smooth animations just makes user interaction better and takes UX of the website to whole another level.
Besides navigation, content flow is also an issue, And I believe that this issue needs his time to get solved. Due to shortage of time, was not able to work on it and incorporate it in prototype supplied above. But yes I have quite some ideas to improve current content flow. If time left We can also improve the way currently authors may be creating blogs and guides on the websites. I think that a content management system like Medium could very well solve the problem. If created than we would not need to write blogs on medium and then redirect them on medium.com, which becomes quite annoying when user needs to navigate between blogs and main site more frequently . We would be able to self host blogs and User can more conveniently navigate to blogs and besides that being having CMS comparable to that of medium's, author would also be able to very conveniently edit blogs or guides created by them.
I hope that you liked my idea and I think that my experience and skill set would make me a great fit to work on this idea.