Zebra Customer Story

Bridging the Gap Between User Documentation and Configuration Applications

Length: 20 mins

Zebra Technologies offers a large and varied product line of scanners, ranging from grocery-store checkout lines to wearable devices used in warehouses. Users configure their devices through an application — but without documentation, it isn’t clear what each configuration actually does.

In this on-demand session, Kiwi Laska and Bryan Sabatini, Technical Writers at Zebra Technologies, show how the team leveraged the extensive, well-structured parameter descriptions in Adobe Experience Manager Guides to deliver product-specific, user-friendly text for hundreds of configuration options — ready for the firmware team to apply directly to the application. The guidance appears exactly when a user needs clarification on a parameter: no long help files, no digging through a user guide. By reusing the same DITA files for tooltips and user guides, Zebra keeps the experience consistent, and by harnessing the power of structured authoring, it delivers customized documentation at every level.

In this session, you’ll learn:

• Content reuse: reusing DITA files for tooltips and user guides streamlines and synchronizes documentation.
• Innovative transformation: a custom DITA-OT transform reinterprets DITA files for a tooltip environment.
• Automated generation: a Python script processes the files and generates bookmaps, turning deliverable creation into a few-minute task.
• Source of truth: extracting keydef values directly from the configuration software files ensures accuracy and speed in documentation updates.