Follow-up from MoT workshop on writing

Hi everyone who was on the workshop,

Thanks very much for your time. If you have thought of questions since the workshop ended, here’s a place you can dump them as I’ll be checking it for a while. Or contact me via the MoT slack.

Or this could just be an embarrassingly empty wasteland, full of nothing but tumbleweeds. :slight_smile:

In the Q&A at the end I mentioned thinking of modeling business logic as a conversation between the user and the system, but couldn’t find a link for it. It’s an episode from the UIE podcast: Episode 241 of The SpoolCast: Steph Hay - Content-first User Experience — UIE.fm — The UX Podcast Network

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I could not make it for the live workshop, but I’ll watch the recording once it is available and post any questions here. I like blogging so this topic appeals to me a lot!

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There was a question about explaining complex business logic (the conversational stuff from the UIE podcast was part of that). I’m pragmatic about this kind of thing, so go with whatever works.

A diagram I find myself using a bit is a UML sequence or swimlane diagram. The combination of Visual Studio Code, GraphViz and a VS Code plugin is the nicest tool I’ve used for this. The plugin: Graphviz Preview - Visual Studio Marketplace, and GraphViz is https://graphviz.org/.

But I also use simple tables or random other diagrams if they make sense for the user, their problem and the document. Visualisations and other diagrams can benefit from their own user story too Visualisations and the stories behind them – Random Tech Thoughts

Someone suggested email as a kind of writing to think about. If they’re explaining emails, then I think the workshop touched on that. If they’re persuading emails or requests, I think that other UX techniques might help. I discuss this in a post that uses trying to introduce mutation testing as an example. I hope that the ideas in that can transfer to email writing. Using User Experience Techniques to Introduce Mutation Testing – Random Tech Thoughts

The person I’ve learned most UX stuff from is Paul Boag (website, podcast and Slack) https://boagworld.com/

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