Back in January 2022, Community team member Tami B wrote a blog post introducing the Mastery Connect Great Guides Overhaul. And today, I’m excited to share that we recently put the finishing touches on that project.
What exactly makes up a documentation overhaul? Well, our team compares doing a documentation overhaul to doing a home inspection. First, you have to look at the guides that are already there. What kind of shape are they in? Are they missing information? Can they be improved?
And then you make a list of things that need to be fixed or replaced.
And then you make a list of things you want to add.
And then you roll up your sleeves and get to work.
Section-by-section the team took a close look at the guides, retitled, rewrote (and in many cases, expanded) the current guides, took new screenshots, added new guides, reorganized, and added a bit of polish. That’s a very simplistic view of the amount of work the team completed, but for their efforts we now have a much stronger foundation for the Mastery Connect guides.
So, why do all this work?
With this work, Mastery Connect users can more easily navigate the guides and quickly find the information they need, while providing a more consistent experience across the Instructure Community. Plus, the reorganization should make it easier and faster for the Documentation folks to make updates as needed.
So, what’s next?
At Instructure, our documentation strategy is that the Guides are never really “complete.” Having completed our inspection and foundational work, we can now focus on building and expanding. We regularly meet with the amazing Mastery Connect Product Team to stay apprised of new and updated functionality. We regularly review requests we receive from Community members, CSMs, and Support to add or clarify information in the Guides. And sometimes, we simply learn something about the product we didn’t know.
And now, everybody loves numbers, right?
Here’s some fun Mastery Connect Overhaul stats:
- 18 months and 2000+ hours of work
- 150+ new Guides
- Total Guide count now 450+
- 3 documentation specialists, 2 interns, and 1 team alumni
- Innumerable
argumentsdiscussions about sentence construction, capitalization, naming conventions, em dashes vs. en dashes, and Oxford commas
Please join me in applauding this small, but mighty, crew for their efforts! While overhauling the Mastery Connect guides they also managed releases and documentation updates for Mastery Connect, Canvas Studio, Canvas Catalog, Elevate K12 Analytics, and several other Instructure products!
