Teal Documentation

2023 - 2024 | Product Design

Teal helps SMB software companies build accounting products for their customers.

Context

As someone coming to Teal’s documentation, you could be in one of a few situations: you are evaluating Teal to decide if you want to purchase it, you are on the implementation team, or you are a developer. To understand if you wanted to purchase Teal, what to build, or how to build your application using Teal’s APIs took careful reading of dense explanations of accounting terminology.

Problem

Teal’s documentation did not have a consistent strategy. Much of what was written was precise and articulate, yet too dense to be necessarily actionable. We had the opportunity to design a documentation system that would work towards all three target audiences: it could easy for people to understand the power of Teal, know what they could build, and how to build it.

Solution

I lead the design of the content strategy, organization of the information, defined the writing guides, wrote documentation, and laid out what the road map for the work would be going forward.

The strategy was rooted in a strong experience for our first customers. We needed to ensure they could successfully build and launch their implementations using our API, yet we were constrained by capacity. Long term, the documentation needed to address all three aforementioned audiences, but we needed to immediately focus on the first two groups: those who were deciding what to build and those doing the building.

This hybrid of technical and semi-technical audiences helped us define the layout and design of the documentation itself. The focus then was one around consistency: how do we talk about building with Teal in a way that is predictable and understandable. Some limitations not withstanding, we were able to create a coherent narrative for the guides, one that lead new users through building a mental model of accounting while also supporting their set up of their Platform and their users’ Instances.

See the docs:docs.teal.dev