As a Technical Writer at Tamr, I wrote technical content, designed decision trees, conducted UX research, and contributed to UX writing.
Scroll below to see how I wrote and designed the first Tamr Cloud user glossary.
Introduction
Since Tamr was transitioning its central platform to Tamr Cloud, I advocated and took the lead in creating an entire glossary encompassing all the old and new technical terms that users would need to understand to use the product. Tamr Cloud has many unique terms associated with Tamr that can't be readily found online such as "Cluster," "Company Site," "Data Citizen," and more. I worked cross-functionally with marketing, data science, and UX to locate valuable terms for which to write definitions.
The Tamr Data Products Demo video includes many terms found in the glossary. New users may be overwhelmed and have a bad user experience if they don’t know what these words mean!
The problem
Tamr has many foreign terms that must be understood to use the Tamr Cloud platform to its fullest potential without errors. Tamr, as an organization, aims to deliver clean, accurate, and continuous data to drive organizational business goals. If users don’t understand what the words in the user interface, documentation, and stakeholder presentations mean, they can not ensure they are using it correctly; thus, the data they trust Tamr to optimize is being misunderstood and misapplied.
I knew this was an issue, as research and data from stakeholders and users showed that many terms were being changed, and there was confusion about what terms meant and how this affected the user journey.
Goals a glossary would achieve:
Increase site visibility and ranking through keywords and internal linking (SEO)
Localization of complex information across different geographic regions using language
Improve the user experience across the Tamr Cloud platform
Consistency in terms used across the company (marketing, UX, communication, etc.).
The solution
For this project to be successful, I knew I had to take the lead and work cross-functionally to gather information about my audience and the highly technical side of the Tamr product to meet the project’s goals. I worked with the following teams for the following reasons:
Marketing: This team promotes products and services to potential customers. They know best about SEO and what prospective Tamr users search for, such as frequently searched words and products. As a result, I worked closely with them to gather terms that needed to be uniform across Tamr that would help site visibility and ranking.
Data Engineering: This team works on the technical aspects of the Tamr Cloud platform. They collect, validate, and prepare data for businesses, data analysts, and data scientists. While I researched and used the product as a user advocate, they have the highest level of knowledge on what terms mean in the platform, which allows me to write them in plain language for user understanding.
UX/Project Managers: I worked with project managers on the UX and product team to gather information on frequently confusing terms that have impacted the user experience across the UI. In doing so, I understood how undefined terms hinder the user experience and how internally linking the glossary in the UI and documentation can help users reach their goals.
A helpful strategy I used for locating potential terms was to go through the UI and user journey maps to identify potential pain points users would face when encountering foreign terms.
The outcome
By obtaining valuable insights and data, I could research, create, and define more than 40 terms for the glossary. The glossary was a valuable resource for sharing knowledge for Tamr and its users. I used page analytics to observe that users frequently used the glossary upon publishing, which achieved the goal of advancing site visibility and ranking. This project helped multiple teams figure out how to standardize and localize multiple terms to be used consistently across Tamr. Additionally, this was helpful for internally linking glossary definitions to other documents and the UI for the Tamr Cloud platform. As a result, the project helped drive organizational goals and improve the user experience successfully.
Project Roles:
Technical Writer
Lexicographer
Information Architect
For example, words such as “source records” and “tamr record id” in the UI can now be defined through the glossary! I explored the UI and user research findings to find words that may be confusing and need to be defined for users.