I produced this documentation set for Corda Technologies' PopChart+OptiMap product, version 5.1. It was based on my original PopChart 4 Documentation, however I made numerous changes to content, content organization, web layout, and so on. Some of these changes reflect new product features, while other changes reflect lessons learned about how different audiences (developers, administrators, designers, and so on) learn to use our product.

Like the PopChart 4 Documentation, I produced the documentation in two formats: PDF and HTML. The documentation is single-sourced from Framemaker 7.0 (as opposed to 6.0 for PopChart 4), and I used a highly-modified Webworks template to convert it into the HTML version. I used conditional text and variables to produce three distinct branches of our documentation: PopChart, OptiMap, and PopChart+OptiMap.

I list this documentation under several portfolio categories, so let me take a moment to justify each of those categories:

• Technical Writing - This should be pretty obvious. One thing that I would like to point out here is that the documentation took a very multi-audience oriented approach for this version, which is vast improvement over the developer-oriented PopChart 4 documentation.
• Product Design & User Interface - In the process of writing the documentation, I became heavily involved in product design and usability review. This was mostly motivated by my desire to make the product so usable that I wouldn't need to write any documentation. Of course, that was just a pipe dream, but I still helped our development team make things less convoluted. Also, you might argue that designing the documentation interface is itself is an exercise in product design and usability--you have to figure out how to efficiently meet the educational needs of you users.
• Web Development - First off, I had to gain a knowledge of what I was documenting, and the product was a heavily web oriented product. This involved developing a number of examples for all sorts of web environments. Secondly, I had to make a lot of customizations to the WebWorks templates (which translates our FrameMaker files to HTML) to get our current look and feel. This involved a lot of JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. It also took a while to get it XHTML compliant.

You might also want to check out my entry on the Automated Documentation Build process, as this greatly simplifies our documentation generation.

To see the PopChart+OptiMap 5.1 documentation, click below:

• PopChart+OptiMap 5.1 Documentation