Portfolio > Writing and Editing > Software Help Documentation > Wage Garnishment

Project Overview

In my position as technical writer for a large fintech company, I served as the sole writer for a corporate online banking product. This product included all the features available to consumer banking customers and additional corporate features such as enhanced payment features, reporting capabilities, and user roles and permissions to control what accounts and features employees could access. The corporate team wanted to add an additional type of payment recipient to allow corporate banking users to easily garnish an employee’s wages for child support or third-party tax payments. I created new and updated existing online help topics to assist users in using this new feature.

Skills

Writing & Editing

• Research

• Interviewing Subject Matter Experts

• Structured Authoring

The Process

Planning & Creation

To prepare for writing this content, I researched the feature by reading Jira tickets about the feature, attending the team’s stand-ups and sprint demos, and interviewing the corporate banking product owner. I spent a lot of time using the feature in our QA and CI branches to test the functionality and gain a deep understanding of how the feature worked.

The Product

A corporate banking customer would likely be familiar with the process for creating payments and using recipients, but wage garnishment payments require some unique information in order to provide the government entity requesting the garnishment with the required information. Because the steps for creating a wage garnishment recipient differ from those for creating other types of recipients, I created a separate topic for this content.

The following image shows the online help topic I created to walk the user through this task.

One of the challenges of this project was how much detail to go into in the task topic about filling out required fields. Most of these fields were intuitive, so I opted to leave out detailed instructions for these fields in the online help article. I worked with the development team to provide info tips within the application for those fields that were more complex to provide users with help content when and where they needed it most.