A lot of people have ideas on what Web3 needs to grow:

Better UX, Better Apps, Interoperable Account Chain Abstraction or whatever, or more L2s! (just kidding, no one thinks this)

As your local neighborhood developer experience thinkboi, I would like to add empathy to this list.

Let me explain.

What is Empathy?

To make the case for empathy, you need to know what it means.

There are many definitions of empathy, but the best one I feel is "the ability to understand and share someone else's feelings or experience".

To develop empathy, try to find a connection between your experiences and those of others. While no two experiences are identical, these small similarities are where empathy exists.

Empathy Applied

I'm going to focus on empathy in documentation but the ideas can be applied to any type of content trying to engage and educate readers in this industry.

Developer content, mainly documentation, is created with an audience in mind. I'm very skeptical when working with teams that say their documentation is only for developers.

Even if developers are your main audience, simply saying "developers" is so vague you might as well be writing for no one.

Who are these developers? What experience and skill level do they have? Are they in the room with us right now?

If you don't know your audience, how can you even start to have empathy with them?

Your Audience - Simplified

In the past when working on projects, I would do some audience analysis. I would draft up some personas, and give them cute names, practical job titles, and relatable companies they work for.

They were beautiful presentations but a complete waste of time.

In most cases, especially in Web3, it's still really hard to get precise data on your readers and their goals. Even more so, the reader may be an LLM summoned by their developer master to sort through piles of information and return something mildly useful.

I now just have one audience in mind when writing docs - the first-time reader.

Make the First Time, the best time

The first-time reader is an ideal audience to empathize with. We have all been a first-time reader before. We know the feeling of reading something and saying to ourselves "WTF did I just read?"

The first-time reader knows very little about our thing. We need to show them why it's important and useful.

The first-time reader doesn't know where to click next. We need to suggest them good places.

The first-time reader doesn't speak our language. We need to translate it for them.

The first-time reader might have accidentally come to our docs. We need to show them why they should hang out with us a little bit longer.

Thinking this way and seeking ways to empathize with first-time readers improves the experience for all readers.

Beginners then Right?

The first-time reader does not equal a beginner.

I see so many teams that stress out and put a lot of effort into being "beginner-friendly". They'll make glossaries and beginner guides on general crypto topics, aiming to be a starting point for their project and Web3 as a whole.

This is an admirable goal but not an effective one in terms of building empathy with your audience. (Also, does the world need yet another video explaining what a consensus mechanism is?)

Once you are past the beginner stage yourself, it becomes harder to empathize with actual beginners. Even when you start something new as a beginner, your existing knowledge and ability to learn quickly move you beyond that stage.

Learning a new instrument or language is different if you already know others.

On the flip side, you can easily become a first-time reader any day or time of the week. Being a more experienced first-time reader has its benefits, but some basic questions come up for all first-time readers.

In fact, this is your homework:

Go to a protocol's doc site that you have never visited before.

Take some notes. Some questions I like to ask myself:

• What did you learn about the protocol in the first 3 pages of the docs?

• From the page titles alone, can you tell what a developer can build with this protocol?

• After the "Getting Started/Quickstart, are there any clear paths on what you can do next?

Share your experiences in the comments to help others learn—or keep them to yourself.

Warning: This Isn't Easy

The homework above may seem easy, but being empathetic to first-time readers of your work is much harder.

I once worked on a docs site for 8 months before noticing the welcome page was absolutely trash. Why? Because I never read it. Every time I read the docs, I knew where I was going.

I'm going to end it here to keep this short, see you in Part 2 where I share some great examples of empathy in Web3 documentation and marketing!