“Much more than just writing.” How I got started as a content designer

Content design is a relatively new discipline, but one that deeply affects how users perceive, choose, and use products. People who work in content design can take many names (content designers, UX writers, product writers, just to name a few) but in a nutshell, our job is to help users accomplish goals on an interface by providing them with the right guidance at the right time. Unlike visual designers, content designers are not responsible for the graphic layout or the look and feel of a given interface — instead, we own what we call the conversation between product and user along each journey to ensure that the user has all the information they need to reach their goal.

The interesting thing is — when interfaces are concerned, the more effective the text, the less noticeable it will be to users. Great content on an interface “just works”; it disappears into a delightful user experience while leading happy users to success, whatever it is they’re trying to get done with a given product. Content designers achieve that by making sure they know user needs inside out and which problems the product is trying to solve. Next, in partnership with visual designers, Continue reading

Cloudflare Tunnel for Content Teams

A big part of the job of a technical writer is getting feedback on the content you produce. Writing and maintaining product documentation is a deeply collaborative and cyclical effort — through constant conversation with product managers and engineers, technical writers ensure the content is clear and serves the user in the most effective way. Collaboration with other technical writers is also important to keep the documentation consistent with Cloudflare’s content strategy.

So whether we’re documenting a new feature or overhauling a big portion of existing documentation, sharing our writing with stakeholders before it’s published is quite literally half the work.

In my experience as a technical writer, the feedback I’ve received has been exponentially more impactful when stakeholders could see my changes in context. This is especially true for bigger and more strategic changes. Imagine I’m changing the structure of an entire section of a product’s documentation, or shuffling the order of pages in the navigation bar. It’s hard to guess the impact of those changes just by looking at the markdown files.

We writers check those changes in context by building a development server on our local machines. But sharing what we see locally with our stakeholders has Continue reading

The Teams Dashboard: Finding a Product Voice

My name is Alice Bracchi, and I’m the technical and UX writer for Cloudflare for Teams, Cloudflare's Zero Trust and Secure Web Gateway solution.

Today I want to talk about product voice — what it is, why it matters, and how I set out to find a product voice for Cloudflare for Teams.

On the Cloudflare for Teams Dashboard (or as we informally call it, “the Teams Dash”), our customers have full control over the security of their network. Administrators can replace their VPN with a solution that runs on Zero Trust rules, turning Cloudflare's network into their secure corporate network. Customers can secure all traffic by configuring L7 firewall rules and DNS filtering policies, and organizations have the ability to isolate web browsing to suspicious sites.

All in one place.

As you can see, a lot of action takes place on the Teams Dash. As an interface, it grows and changes at a rapid pace. This poses a lot of interesting challenges from a design point of view — in our early days, because we were focused on solving problems fast, many of our experiences ended up feeling a bit disjointed. Sure, users were able to Continue reading