Specialization myopia syndrome and the content journey
Technology's trajectories include an ever-increasing acceleration towards complexity and specialization. As a result, documentation portals begin to mirror this same specialized focus, with a lot of niches and deep knowledge into single lines of tech. What gets lost in this world of hyper-specialization is the broad view of products and how they fit and flow together. The broad view -- what the product is, what it's used for, what are all the pieces involved, who is the intended audience, how does it fit within the larger landscape -- gets traded for a hundred tiny micro-views of each part and how to implement them. The larger developer journey, if there is one, gets muffled by micro-paths leading everywhere and nowhere.
Because technical writers are generalists (who help shape docs across many different product groups, platforms, and services), we are the last hope for some semblance of higher-level stories and journeys in documentation. As technical writers, we can "specialize" in big-picture thinking, in shaping the developer's journey through a systems-level product landscape. We can try to connect all the fragments together into a coherent whole. But moving in this direction runs against the flow of specialization, in part because much of what is developed is still searching for shape and form even as the code itself is being written.
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About Tom Johnson
Tom Johnson is an accomplished senior technical writer in Seattle, Washington. He is widely recognized for his blog, https://idratherbewriting.com, which explores a wide variety of technical communication topics and has attracted a large following since he started it in 2006. Tom has also created an extensive API documentation course (https:/idratherbewriting.com/learnapidoc) that has helped hundreds of technical writers transition into API documentation. His expertise and innovative approaches to technical communication have led to more than 100 presentations at industry events. Tom is an experimenter and innovator at heart, constantly exploring new ideas, processes, tools, and approaches to tech comm. His inclination to experiment gives rise to much of what he writes about on his blog.
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