Selecting Your Topic
This page will guide you in selecting appropriate topics for your wiki project.
What to Do
1️⃣Identify industries to target and list three sub-categories for each industry that your company would support.
2️⃣Pick the theme of your start-up OR analyze the deal with the real company you are taking on as a client. From your brainstorming section, narrow down the sub-category that interests you the most AND has clear equipment and technical processes within the job scope. Selecting a sub-category that isn’t technical enough will make this assignment harder (really, really… technical writing is easier for technical topics).
3️⃣Write the user scenario for your start-up’s onboarding. The user scenario outlines the target audience and will guide the topics in your packet.
4️⃣Brainstorm at least 5 options for the mechanism and process related to your company theme. Giving yourself a list of options means you can CHOOSE the best ones.
How to Brainstorm the Industry
Brainstorm industries that you want to work within to narrow down the scope of the topics. Your wiki needs to support the employees as a start-up or other small company, so figure out the overall industry first. Write down big topics like Fitness, Aerospace, Health, Consumer Goods, and Animals. For every industry you have, write down three sub-categories your company would support.
1. Understanding Your Project’s Goal:
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Imagine the Company: Pretend you’re starting a small business. What kind of business excites you? What problems do you want to solve? Thinking like this will help you choose an industry.
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The Wiki’s Purpose: Your project is to create a wiki (an information website) for this company. This wiki will help your employees learn, find resources, and work better together.
2. Brainstorming Industries:
- Let’s Get Visual: Grab a big sheet of paper or open a blank document.
- Big Picture Ideas: Write down broad categories like:
- Fitness
- Aerospace
- Health
- Consumer Goods
- Animals
- Technology
- Education
- Finance
- Entertainment
- Food
- Fashion
- Travel
- Transportation
- Construction
- Renewable Energy
- …and any others that interest you!
3. Digging Deeper – Subcategories:
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Focus on Each Industry: Choose one industry that really speaks to you.
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The Breakdown: Under that industry, write down three more specific areas. These will be the things your company might focus on.
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Examples:
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Industry: Fitness
- Subcategories:
- Personal Training
- Sports Nutrition
- Fitness Equipment
- Subcategories:
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Industry: Technology
- Subcategories:
- Software Development
- Cybersecurity
- Cloud Computing
- Subcategories:
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Industry: Animals
- Subcategories:
- Pet Care Products
- Veterinary Services
- Wildlife Conservation
- Subcategories:
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Example Brainstorming Session:
Let’s say you’re really interested in the Health industry. Here’s what your brainstorming might look like:
- Industry: Health
- Subcategories:
- Mental Health Services
- Medical Equipment Manufacturing
- Holistic Health Education
Now you have three possible directions for your wiki project within the Health industry!
Remember: There are no wrong answers here. The goal is to explore your interests and find a topic that motivates you to create an awesome wiki!
How to Narrow the User Scenario
To begin creating your materials, choose a company to base your content around. You can select a real company (less fun) or make up your own start-up (more creative opportunities).
Once you’ve chosen a company, it’s time to start fleshing out the details. Give your company a name that reflects its values and mission. This will help create a brand identity you can build your materials around.
Next, create a mission statement. A mission statement should be a short, clear statement that explains what your company does and why it exists. This will help you focus on your goals and objectives as you create your materials.
Finally, list the employees in your mock company. This can include job titles, responsibilities, and even brief bios if you really want to get the creative energy flowing. By doing this, you’ll be able to visualize the user scenario for your materials more clearly and create content that speaks directly to your target audience.
AI Prompting Tip
You can plug the details of your company into the interns to help you quickly make a list of employees at your start-up. They are great at building personas and backgrounds. Try a variation of this prompt:
Act as the director of HR at my start-up [Insert name and industry]. Generate a list of 10 employees, including their roles in the company and the equipment or processes they need training on for the job. Create a short bio for each employee.
Remember, the more details you provide in your imagined mock company, the stronger the rhetorical situation you give yourselves to analyze. The next step is to select the employee role you want to focus on for this assignment. In our scenario, you are starting the wiki for the team with the expectation that your co-workers will add more content. Since this is the start of your documentation library—with just two entries—you can focus on one job role for which you want to select the equipment and process.
The role you select will help you build the user scenario, which is a more specific explanation of the target audience and purpose of a product. User scenarios are detailed stories that describe how a specific user interacts with a product or service in a particular situation. They help designers, developers, and other stakeholders understand the user’s needs, goals, and challenges, ultimately leading to a better user experience.
- User: Describe the user (e.g., age, experience level, role).
- Goal: What is the user trying to achieve?
- Context: Where and when is the user trying to achieve this goal?
- Actions: What steps does the user take to achieve their goal?
- Pain Points: What challenges or frustrations does the user encounter?
- Success: How does the user know they have achieved their goal?
If you are interested in or are still confused about why visualizing a specific audience is helpful when selecting topics and designing content, you can read more about a user story template and how to write a user story.
Example: User Onboarding and Training[1]
User: Sarah, a 25-year-old marketing associate with 1 year of experience, is starting her new job at a tech company that makes elite headphones and audio equipment for recording studios and sound engineers.
Goal: Sarah wants to learn about the company culture, understand her role and responsibilities, and feel comfortable using the company’s tools and systems.
Context: Sarah is on her first day at the office, sitting at her new desk with a laptop and onboarding materials. She needs to learn about the main equipment, software, and processes that relate to audio equipment and the products she will be marketing.
Actions: Sarah reads through the technical descriptions packet in her onboarding kit that describes the key equipment and processes involved in the sound industry.
Pain Points: Sarah finds the technical training focused on the company’s custom project management tool lacking clear instructions and feels lost trying to navigate its features.
Success: She clearly understands her role and its impact on the company’s success. She also learns more about the process of hearing and what actually happens in our inner ear when sound waves vibrate the tissues.
Brainstorm Wiki Topics
Both topics in your wiki must relate to the user scenario (so they need to clearly connect to the company and employees you’ve decided will use your wiki). Create a list with at least 5 options for equipment in that job and technical processes to narrow down and pick the best ones.
Good topics are the ones from your brainstorm that meet three criteria:
- You have direct access to the object, product, or experience with the process (because then you can generate all your own content)
- A clear technical focus is present, making identifying features/functions/purposes easier. When a topic is too simple, it will be harder to develop the need for visuals, tables, and expanded functions.
- You see value in that topic for a professional in your field. The skills we are practicing with technical writing apply to almost every field (literary fields and art are a bigger stretch). I’m not sure why you selected a technical writing class for your credit in that case 🤷♀️. When you take the time to find the connection for yourself, you will experience better satisfaction with these projects.
AI Prompting Tip
You can use an AI tool to brainstorm new topic ideas to pitch. Because we want a specific topic, you need to train and explain to the AI what you want in the ideas.
The more concrete information you feed it, the better the response. You need to tell the AI exactly what company, user scenario, and types of ideas you want it to generate content like. Try adapting the basic prompt below until you get the information you want from the AI ⬇️
Generate a list of topics related to this type of company and industry that a new employee would need to know for their job. Include ideas for mechanisms, equipment, technical, physical, chemical, and biological processes. The output should be a table showing each type of idea and an example of why the employee would need a technical description of that thing. The table should have at least 11 rows.Use what the AI generates as a first draft to edit, revise, refine, and change based on your voice, purpose, and our project requirements. You will find the content a good first draft with some helpful ideas, but it must be revised and edited to make sense and be useful.
Content on this page was partially generated and edited using Google Gemini Pro. The author then took care to edit and verify the content. Prompts used that were not already noted: “Act as a patient teacher helping students who are completely lost when trying to work on a project. You will need to provide specific steps and don’t assume they can figure it out. Expand on this general advice…..(I inserted various content to expand on my ideas).”
- Example scenario generated by Google Gemini. Prompt: Write a user scenario example of a young professional onboarding with a tech company that creates headphones. 2/14/2024 ↵
