Going Modular: Turning Legacy Documentation into User Story-Based Content

About the Presentation:
How to adapt the big guides of yesterday into modularized narratives that are easy to maintain, scale well, and still allow for a ‘guide-like’ experience when it is required? This presentation will describe the work documentation writers at Red Hat are doing to solve this problem: re-purposing the existing body of documentation into modular units that can be combined into user-story-based content.

The talk will also outline how to leverage the modular structure of content to present it to users in a dynamic manner — using a metadata-based, hierarchical navigation.
The two main topics of the talk are how to improve user experience with documentation, and how to reduce the maintenance burden on documentation writers. The presentation outlines an approach that a number of documentation teams at Red Hat have started to pioneer: turning existing content into modular units and developing new content in a modular manner, while employing content-strategy focused on identified, validated user stories.

The talk will introduce the terminology and explain the motivation for this work by describing the shortcomings of ‘legacy’ documentation. It will then present the proposed solution to the problems and show specific examples of content modularization. I will also illustrate how the presented ideas help to both improve user experience and make life easier for documentation contributors.

Presenter: Robert Kratky, RedHat