“This place is magical.”
Not the phrase you’d expect of a local hardware store, right? Yet, that’s how I describe the one in my neighborhood.
It’s no big-box Home Depot or Lowes kind of place. It’s tiny compared to what it holds. It’s maayyybe 5,000 square feet (450 square meters), yet… every time I go, they have the exact thing I need.
Usually there is only one or two of that thing. There is also magic in easy choices.
But there’s even more magic when I ask someone for help.
Recently, my son and I went to the store with plans to recreate a science experiment he’d seen on YouTube. We needed rare earth magnets and copper wire.
A teen at the front helped us out. For the first request, he sent us to “Aisle 11, halfway down, next to the picture hangers.”
Like magic, there they were. He had a similar answer for the next item. Then, he correctly guessed what we were building and shared about his similar science projects.
Think that was a great hardware store experience?
But I can hear you wondering what it would have been like without the teen helping. What if he had school?
The product—an organized and well-supplied hardware store—would still be there without him.
My son and I could have explored the aisles on our own. We could have looked at the names of each aisle and guessed our way to magnets and wire.
Some shoppers probably prefer that way!
The store supports both approaches, and so should your documentation.
You want references, use cases, tutorials, and more available to developers. Combining functional and contextual documentation, and ensuring each is easy to find, are among the ways ​documentation teams contribute to developer experience​.
In fact, all of your content has an experience:
- Information architecture of docs
- Sub-headings in blog posts
- Focus on developer problems
All of these provide signs above the aisles, an understanding of common projects, or both.
Sometimes it’s hard to see from the outside (which is ​where we can help​), but you’ll always find ways to improve your “storefront.”