https://audio.dev/ -- @audiodevcon
ADC Bristol - 9th - 11th November
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How I Learned to Love the Docs - Documentation As Design Process for Music Tech Products - Astrid Bin - ADC 2025
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Product documentation is often seen as a ""nice-to-have"" that comes at the end of the design and implementation process, and something that few small teams have time for. But for audio products - notoriously complex, serving a multitude of styles and purposes, usually with a conceptual model that isn't obvious to newcomers - communicating what a product does and how it works is crucial. So what do you do if there's no one to produce documentation?
I'm a music tech designer who has learned to love the docs. In this talk I'll share why I think documentation is so important (to you as well as your customers), how I learned to get good at writing it, and why I think it's a vital aspect of design. I'll explain how I think about docs (and some good examples), and through a case study of my first big user manual, I'll describe why I think documentation is secret the superpower design skill. In case you want to go straight home and write some documentation, I'll also prodvide suggestions of how to approach docs, when to start them, some tools I've found useful, and how to leverage the power of documentation to improve your products while they're still being developed.
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Slides: http://data.audio.dev/talks/2025/how-i-learned-to-love-the-docs.pdf
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Astrid Bin
Astrid Bin is an artist and designer who specialises in making complex things useful, beautiful and understandable. Alongside her history of working as an announcer for international Lego robot competitions and explaining rocket science to children, she's also worked as a music technology researcher across academia and industry. Most recently she was the founding designer of Bela, and is currently working in e-textiles research for musical interacton and freelancing on interesting projects. She lives in Berlin.
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ADC is an annual event celebrating all audio development technologies, from music applications and game audio to audio processing and embedded systems. ADC’s mission is to help attendees acquire and develop new audio development skills, and build a network that will support their audio developer career.
Annual ADC Conference - https://audio.dev/
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Streamed & Edited by Digital Medium Ltd: https://online.digital-medium.co.uk
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Organized and produced by JUCE: https://juce.com/
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Special thanks to the ADC25 Team:
Sophie Carus
Derek Heimlich
Andrew Kirk
Bobby Lombardi
Tom Poole
Ralph Richbourg
Jim Roper
Jonathan Roper
Prashant Mishra
#adc #audiodev #dsp #audio #conferenceaudio #audioprocessing #audioproduction #audioprogramming #sound #music #musictech #soundtech #audiotech #audiotechnology
