Visual Documentation Language, WriteTheDocsEU 2015

A picture says more than …how many lines of code?
Firstly this talk offers an introduction to a variety of established as well as experimental visual documentation methods. Subsequently, it explores the question whether or not these approaches can be applied to software documentation in a reasonable way.
In this regard it takes a closer look at individual methods and estimates their corresponding affordances in terms of time, skill, resources and potential automatization. Eventually, this talk presents an initial attempt to translate existing docs into visual languages and discusses the according outcomes.
Primarily, the objective of reading and writing the docs serves the purpose to convey clear, unambiguous information, at the same time, the experience should be as engaging and pleasant as possible. Building a Visual Documentation Language serves to reach this goal.

Transcript