Hi everyone I'm Daniel Waisberg I'm
an Analytics Advocate at Google and I'm
here with Rick Elliott. He is a technical
writer on the Analytics Education team and
he's responsible for the Help Center
the Data Studio Help Center. So welcome, Rick
Thank you for coming.
Thank you
So Rick, can we start and what exactly do you do
at Google and how does your day to day look
like
yeah so as Daniel said I'm a technical
writer and at Google that encompasses a lot
of different things but primarily i'm in
charge of producing help content for the
help center, tutorial videos, tutorial
reports and working on the text that is
actually in the product, all that is
meant to communicate how to use
a product effectively.
ok can you share
with us
how's the life of a help center
article and how does it go from
conception to production.
Good questions
So first of all every
piece of content that we produce
we produce that with the customer, the user,
in mind so I don't want to write
anything that doesn't actually help
people use the product so there's always
a question about what do we need to
communicate and depending on you know a
lot of times that's the new feature that
gets released or a question from an
actual user or sometimes i just am using
the product and have questions or
realizations myself so I get a bee in my
bonnet to write some piece of content
once the decision has been made to write
some content or produce any kind of
material the next step is to figure out
okay what's the best way to do that?
does it belong in the help center is it
best done with a tutorial or sample report?
And then it's just a process of
interviewing the experts, the subject
matter experts, using the product myself.
I do a lot of playing around with the
product
yeah and there's some back-and-forth
with reviews and at a certain point we
declare victory and publish it and then
if there's more feedback than will
revise it and and move on
So it's a kind of an organic process
Cool! So there's a new section the chart
reference which is a new section on the
Help Center it's a massive amount of
information. It's a really great section
I really enjoyed it and it helped me a lot
working with Data Studio. Can you share
a little bit about the process of
writing that section particularly.
Yeah, so that was that was an example pretty
much of me getting a bee in my bonnet
I had been thinking that we needed to
have some basic information on the
types of charts. Perhaps not all of our
users are going to be data visualization
experts. It also came into existence
because we actually have some
complicated configuration options on
some of those charts but they're pretty
minute details and it would be a little
strange to just have an article on a
particular widget like, you know, "Data to Zero"
-- Missing data -- those kinds of small
configuration options. So having those
two ideas in my head, I thought that it
would be good to have an article on each
chart type that documented kind of
theoretically what that particular kind
of chart is good for, e.g., what is a bullet
chart and and why might I want to
use it? How do we...
what are our customizations in Data
Studio, like how is a bullet chart in
Data Studio perhaps different
from the normal bullet chart. And then
some examples, and then finally all of
the configuration options that are there.
So if the complexity or features of
the charts
expand in the future we have a place to
put that information. And it turned into
this nine article tome.
Yeah so one of the things that I really
like about the Data Studio Help Center
is that it is very diverse and there are
videos, as you said, then you know lots of
images of on how to do things but by far
the most amazing help that we get
from you is the tutorial that you wrote
for Data Studio, which really it's like you're
holding people's hands and leading them
into learning how to use Data Studio on
the step-by-step. And so where did you get
the idea from?
So that's what we call the
warm welcome report and the idea
fundamentally was how could we use Data Studio
to teach Data Studio and this is
something that we have kind of a unique
opportunity to do with the Data Studio
product because it's so visual and we
have this canvas that we can put
text and images and interactive
reports. So a user can come in, a new
customer can come in, see this report.
We were able to annotate it and lead people
through the process of the most
basic steps of getting started with Data Studio
This whole idea began as a
conversation between the lead designer
on the product, Dave Wright, and myself and
we were looking at some other products
with Google products like Google Keep, as
well as some other tools that we use
here, like Camtasia, that have tutorials
built right into the product using the
product and we thought well how can we
do that with Data Studio? So we came
up just basically with this simple
multi-page report that we annotated -
my favorite part of the report are the
little post-it notes that we put on
there to give people tips and those are
simply images that we put some text
on and I think it works pretty well.
It does I really enjoyed it going through
the whole process.
So, as technical writer,
I guess you have to be really
sharp when it comes to the product, right?
You have to understand and use it. I mean,
do you use it on a day to day basis?
It sure helps. Yeah I do actually. I do a
lot of... I probably create five or six
reports everyday as I'm writing articles
Or I'll use the same report over and over
again and and apply charts,
visualizations, and controls, make sure I
understand how they work. But I've also
used the product internally to track
some of the things that I'm interested
in -- how many people are coming to our
help center, for example, in Google
Analytics? I put together a dashboard for
that. And so by actually putting myself
in the users' shoes literally I'm able
to feel where the pain points are, understand
what I needed to know to get started and
I'm not a data visualization expert so
sometimes I ask really basic questions
and it turns out that other people have
those questions as well so...
Great so last question
There are many bloggers out
there writing about data visualization
about Data Studio, about Google Analytics
Where do you find the muse to write the
articles and you know how to get ideas
I read a lot of poetry!
Well yeah so technical writing is a
different kind of writing but you do
have to have some inspiration for it and
for me it really is the user, putting
myself in my customers shoes
Asking myself what they need to know?
What would I want to know.
Understanding what's
frustrating because the product is in
development and are some sharp edges and
we want to fix those, and sometimes
we have to document them and then and
then we fix them later on.
So it's an evolving process but always it comes
down to trying to figure out how to take
something that might be a bit complex
and make it simple and that's the
fun part of it that's kind of like a
puzzle. I think every technical writer
really enjoys that mental challenge and
publishing for the web actually
has a "maker" component to it as well
When i get to press that publish button
and see it live and know that you know
hundreds if not thousands of people are
seeing stuff that I wrote it's both
little scary but it's also super cool to
see it just appear there in the world so
that gives me a bit of a charge every day
Great so thank you very much for
sharing the knowledge and thank you very
much for writing all this amazing stuff.
I'm sure that it's helping many many
thousands of people and it's really
helpful so thank you.
You're welcome
Thank you