I Love the Docs
Documentation As Design Process for Music Tech Products
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.
Astrid Bin
Director of Design
Bela.io
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, and currently leads design at Bela.io. She lives in Berlin.