Help Center / site

Summary

As the Sr Manager of Technical Content Strategy, my team owns and maintains the NS1 Help Center. The Help Center is hosted by Zendesk and contains our library of documentation for all generally available products.

My role

  • I’ve written or edited most of the documentation contained within the Help Center (with some exceptions).

  • I applied custom CSS to the best of my ability to improve the look, feel, and function of the Help Center on my own due to the lack of budget or dedicated resources.

  • I am always looking for ways to improve the information architecture and organization of content to improve usability.

  • I implemented a third-party tool (Paligo) that allows us to reuse content and publish in several formats from a single source of truth.

Go to http://help.ns1.com to view the live Help Center. Upon request, I am happy to point you to specific examples of content I authored.

API reference / site

Summary

Being an API-first company, NS1’s API documentation is a critical component in ensuring a positive developer experience. When I joined NS1, I inherited an API documentation site built by engineers and marketers, but that continues to require refinement and maintenance within the constraints of limited bandwidth, a fast-moving development pace, and the typical communication gaps often found in startup environments. This means our API doc site improvements have been slow and incremental as we aim to improve existing API documentation while keeping up with new and improved feature delivery.

Despite these challenges, I’m always working to improve the quality — as in, completeness, accuracy, usefulness, and presentation — of our API documentation. Additionally, I’m always on the lookout for inspiration related to API and developer documentation to ensure we’re adhering to generally accepted standards and best practices.

Limitations

The API documentation site is hosted by the marketing website and is subject to marketing style sheets and processes. Unfortunately, the look, feel, and function of the API docs site is not particularly conducive to a modern developer experience. I worked with the agency managing our website to try to make some improvements while I work with the team to build a site that better serves our users. Additionally, as a one-person team, I am always advocating for more and better automation tools that ensure content completeness and accuracy. The required processes and tools to accomplish this have been identified, but are yet to be adopted by the broader team.

One of the more recent additions to the API documentation is a new section related to configuring DNSSEC & DNSSEC external keys via API. The new section includes more contextual information than what we typically include.

Refer to https://ns1.com/api for the full documentation site.

Metal 3D printer / spec sheet

CHALLENGE

Creating a spec sheet for the world’s first office-friendly metal 3D printer requires thorough research to better understand the target audience—what they’re looking for and how, in context, the information should be organized to be both familiar and educational.

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Hardware specifications

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Intelligent LED fixture / install instructions (multi-lingual)

CHALLENGE
Provide detailed instructions for installing intelligent LED fixtures in an industrial facility — including inline translation into seven languages while adhering to relevant international regulatory requirements.

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Installation instructions

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