Laserfiche Forms is an application that lets you create business processes around online forms. I worked on an agile scrum team with engineers, testers, and product management to create UI content, online help, videos, KB articles, conference presentations, and other user assistance.

• Role: Technical writer
• Timeframe 2012 to 2014
• Methods and skills: Research, card sorting, UI writing, technical writing, information architecture, testing, video production
• Tools: MadCap Flare, Camtasia Studio, HTML, CSS, JavaScript

Research

I conducted user studies during product development and learned that users were confused with the relationship between forms and process models in the product. The customer insights I gained from my user research helped me successfully lobby for user experience improvements.

User feedback

I gathered user feedback through formal user studies, support escalations, and customer questions on Laserfiche forums. In addition, I used web analytics to quickly identify and fix issues with the online help.

Online help

Laserfiche Forms used context-sensitive help links to an online help system. The help is topic-based, with getting started information prioritized in the table of contents. For this help system, I opted for longer topics to create a simple, shallow page hierarchy. Displaying topic contents at the top of each page minimized the negative effects of longer topics and helped users find the right information quickly. Laserfiche Forms 9.1 online help

Videos

Videos were a big part of our content strategy for helping users get started. I created 12 videos for Laserfiche Forms. Each short video covers a specific topic, like configuring database lookups or styling a form. For each video, I created scripts, recorded audio, and used Camtasia to put everything together. Laserfiche Forms video tutorials