Building Empathy-Driven Developer Documentation
summary
Twilio adds a lightweight yes/no pop-up then a custom ratings widget, runs nine one-on-one user sessions, wires low scores into Slack, and discovers maintenance rot across 1,800 unique URLs and 1,500 sample code snippets spanning 20+ products. A rewritten QuickStart raises the user-rated quality 3.67→4.75, Google Analytics and signups also improve, and an A/B test shows big red signup button fails to increase registrations. Changes are iterative, measured, and driven by direct developer feedback.
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chapters (13)
- 0:00Intro
- 4:25How can we know if our docs are good
- 5:28How do we measure quality
- 7:10A new avenue for qualitative understanding
- 9:37Indepth user research
- 10:05User testing
- 11:50Our biggest mistake
- 12:42The wrong question
- 13:42Building a ratings widget
- 15:28Reading comments
- 17:55Reaching out
- 20:07Testing
- 23:31Lessons Learned
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