John Hartnett
Content strategist / Information architect / Technical writer / UX writer
San Francisco bay area
Portfolio
My career includes UX writing, taxonomy and information architecture, and technical writing. Select one of the following project types to quickly navigate to some examples of the work that I have completed.
UX writing projects
IBM/Acoustic DemandTec
(2017 through 2021)
Product
DemandTec omni-channel merchandising and lifecycle pricing platform
Challenge
As part of the acquisition from IBM to Acoustic, DemandTec has undergone a complete user interface redesign to bring a fresh approach to the application and ignite interest in a competitive field.
Solution
User interface design worked with product management to modernize the user interface within all DemandTec products. The user interface predominately looked like a glorified spreadsheet and had a lot of manual interactions to import and export pricing and SKU data.
How I helped
I worked with product management and UX design to provide an entirely new interface which helped to automate several tasks within the DemandTec tool. New interactive dashboards and widgets were implemented to provide quick insight on sales performance and SKU allocations. I worked on new terminology that is used within the user interface as well as dialogue buttons, in-line help, hover text, error messaging, and online help. We want to provide a stream-lined customer interface with affirmative action buttons. As a mobile-friendly user interface which displays several widgets per page, real-estate on a page is at a premium and text must be both clear and concise.
IBM Tealeaf
(2013 through 2017)
Product
Tealeaf Customer Experience application
Challenge
New customer struggle tools were built to provide graphical overlays to help identify data points on a page as to why customers might have abandoned their carts and checkout processes. Additionally, the Tealeaf product was transitioning to a more mobile-friendly user interface.
Solution
Worked with user design to create interactive overlays for heat maps and cursor-movement tracking to help customers identify areas of focus on their web pages. The overlays are used to track the user behavior on each page for each user session. These overlays, in addition to an existing set of overlays, can be used to identify design flaws within your web pages which could potentially result in user abandonment and lost transactions and revenue.
How I helped
I worked with product design and development to create and standardize new terminology for the tools that we were creating. I also helped to create positive user interactions with our tools by working to design clear, positive, and affirmative text with any interactive buttons, dashboards, and workflows within the application. I also created online help articles to support each product feature to help the user understand common use cases as well as workflows within each product feature.
Taxonomy/Information architecture projects
IBM/Acoustic DemandTec
Product
DemandTec omni-channel merchandising and lifecycle pricing platform
Challenge
When the DemandTec product was sold off by IBM to Acoustic, online help needed to be migrated to a new content management system.
Solution
Acoustic chose to use Zendesk to host their online help. The DemandTec online help was migrated from IBM Content Manager (CMS) to Zendesk.
How I helped
I performed pre-migration cleanup tasks to help ensure a clean migration process. I then packaged the content to be consumed by Zendesk’s importing process. Once imported into Zendesk, I performed post clean-up tasks such as re-organizing content as well as fixing any broken links that and missing images that arose post-import. I also worked with UI designers to help to stand up the Help Center front end in Zendesk. Once the migration was complete, I worked with product development to update context-sensitive online help links within the product.
IBM Tealeaf
Product
Tealeaf Customer Experience application
Challenge
Enterprise level Customer Experience product had hundreds of pages of content that were served up through the SharePoint Wiki. The product documentation was difficult to navigate.
Solution
Content was migrated from SharePoint to IBM Content Manager (CMS). Once in content manager, the content was organized by product, then by user role. There was a heavy installation and administrative chunk of content as well as the common use cases for the daily user. Content was outputted into IBM’s Knowledge Center which included search capabilities and navigation trees. In addition, context-sensitive help links were integrated into the Tealeaf application to help bring users to relevant topic areas.
How I helped
I worked with IBM Content Manager (CMS) and IBM Knowledge Center developers to migrate to content from SharePoint into DITA based content chunks within CMS. I organized the content and then worked with product developers to implement context-sensitive help links.
Technical writing projects
IBM/Acoustic DemandTec
Product
Tealeaf Customer Experience application
Project
I documented role administration, price strategy implementation, deal management with vendors, and promotion execution. I was the sole writer for 4 years and implemented two content migrations as the documentation moved into IBM and then out of IBM.
IBM Tealeaf
Product
Tealeaf Customer Experience application
Project
I document product installation, system administration, and general product usage through product user guides.
Note: This product has since been acquired by Acoustic LLC and ported over to Zendesk. Product documentation is now available at: https://help.goacoustic.com/hc/en-us/categories/360003160674-Experience-Analytics-Tealeaf-On-Premise
Symantec Data Loss Prevention
Product
Data Loss Prevention application
Project
Document product installation, system administration, policy and response creation, and general product usage through product user guides. While I was trained for cross-product knowledge, my main focus was writing the Endpoint DLP and Network DLP guides.
Note: This product has since been acquired by Broadcom and ported over to Broadcom’s Tech Docs portal. Product documentation is now available at: https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/symantec-security-software/information-security/data-loss-prevention/15-8.html
IBM BladeCenter
Product
IBM BladeCenter servers, networking modules, and management modules
Project
Develop all installation, maintenance, troubleshooting, and user guides to support IBM Bladecenter and all of its modules. IBM BladeCenter is a single-unit chassis that supports multiple server, networking, and storage modules. It reduces space, cabling, and power requirements within a data center and provides a single point of hardware management and monitoring.
Note: This product has since been acquired by Lenovo and ported over to Lenovo’s Tech Docs portal. Product documentation is now available at: https://bladecenter.lenovofiles.com/help/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.lenovo.bladecenter.hs20.doc%2Fbls_hs20_product_page.html
John Hartnett 