Best way to approach redesigning an existing wiki space

[Jennifer Christie]

Hello! I work for an organization called the HathiTrust Research Center, and years ago it was decided to use a Confluence Wiki space as our user documentation (I know that Confluence is not designed for purposes necessarily beyond internal development documentation, but I was not part of the team then!). In any case, I serve as the UX Specialist for this org and I want to reorganize our user documentation from an informational architectural perspective -- that is, I want to rearrange our wiki documentation "home page" and it's layout, and also reorganize where site sections and pages live. Do you have any recommendations for how to best go about this? I am approaching this project as a redesign of our Wiki, for the benefits of our users, and so that they can more easily and intuitively find the pages they are looking for in our Confluence wiki. Can I do all this in the original space we have set up for our documentation? Would I be able to do this over the course of a few days, or even a couple weeks, without jeopardizing users' current access to that space as I redesign (i.e., if I don't publish my changes until I've complete my redesign, they will still have access to all the documentation, correct?) -- and if I don't publish my changes, and one of our internal devs updates something on that space and publishes, the two users' changed content will not interfere with one another? 

These are just some of the q's that have come to my mind -- if you have other ideas of concerns for this type of project I haven't mentioned, please let me know about those as well!

Thank you!

Jennifer

[Matt Reiner _K15t_ · Accepted solution]

Hi @Jennifer Christie

I think the idea to work on this in another space is a good one! I'd also say to keep in mind that if you're sharing your space publicly, you may impact search engine results with the changes you make. That could be exactly what you're looking for, I just wanted to bring that up.

Also, if you haven't used it before, now might be a good time to use the Page Include and Excerpt Include macros for content reuse purposes, to make your content easier to maintain in the future.

Here's our video on the subject: https://youtu.be/qGjyHshdSTE

Also, as you mentioned, Confluence isn't super full featured for creating external documentation on its own. You might find benefits from checking out my team's Scroll Solution, which is made up of a collection of apps for creating a help center in Confluence. Scroll Viewport, especially, could really maximize the effect of your reorganization because it really improves space navigation.

https://www.k15t.com/solutions/scroll

[Jennifer Christie]

@Matt Reiner _K15t_ great advice and resources -- many thanks!

[Ste Wright · Accepted solution]

Hi @Jennifer Christie 

It does depend on the number of Spaces, and size of your overall Wiki - but I'd suggest doing the redesign in a separate set of Spaces, or in a non-Prod environment.

To do this you could...

• Replicate the Spaces, then copy across the existing design by copying a page and all its subpages 
  • See how to do this in Server/DC here, or Cloud here
• If on Server/DC, use a non-Prod environment, if you have one with a copy of production data
• If on Cloud Premium, use a Sandbox. See how sandboxes work here

There's risk to doing it in live, active spaces - such as...

• You're drafting a page and leave it, and another user edits it later and discards the changes, and/or publishes them
• The Wiki could look disorganised during a rebuild
• A modification might not work as intended, or make functionality worse - and active users would need to experience that, rather than the testing/learning happening elsewhere. This might impact adoption in future

You could then either launch the Wiki as a fresh Space, or make the modifications to the existing Space once you're happy with them!

Ste

[Jennifer Christie]

@Ste Wright thank you so much!