The importance of Technical Documentation

Technical documentation has become a crucial asset for any organization. It allows both your staff and your customers to work autonomously and feel in control of their product. Essentially, a well-researched document helps users achieve their goals using a product, makes the conquest of space possible and saves lives.

It helps your staff do their job more efficiently, reducing the time needed and improving quality of service. It provides employees with a constant and up-to-date knowledge bank that they can easily refer to, thereby reducing the training time and costs and their dependency on each other.

The major reasons why companies today create technical documentation are quite evident. It helps reduce frequent customer tickets, thereby reducing customer service expenses. Also, it helps support teams solve customer queries effectively.

So, the main purpose of technical documentation is to help users achieve their goal using the product. It can be in the form of a printed or online manual, video, and the like.

Enhancing Project Life

Documentation is essential in every step of the project’s life cycle. Without technical documentation, large projects have a risk of falling apart. It helps in the following aspects:

• Process articulation
• Thought process integration across verticals
• Clear reference point for all team members

In addition to internal documentation, end user documentation helps customers have a positive experience while using a product. A lot can be achieved by educating the customer appropriately with the following materials:

• Easily accessible user guides
• Well-researched training materials
• Troubleshooting manuals
• On-demand online help

The winning trick in writing a comprehensive technical document, is to ensure that a customer has all or most of his functionality-related queries, doubts and problems answered via a single source.

This makes them less dependent on your support staff for help for every minor issue faced. This can reduce calls to technical support lines, and therefore greatly cut down your staffing costs.

We can thus safely say that product documentation is an indispensable aid to learning. Your staff or customers can refer to them long after the training session is over. Providing maximum clarity to customers at minimum effort is the main aim of a successful technical document.

Without consistent, concise, and clear documentation, a potential customer is much less likely to have confidence in the product or want to put in the time and effort to learn how to use it.

A Marketing Asset

Today’s customer knows full well the difference between a product or service-oriented technical document, and a cleverly masked marketing initiative. Not only that, the current digital expansion has left little scope for pure marketing pitches, which do little to answer critical queries of a user.

It is here that a potent technical material takes the brand ahead. A concise and informative technical document has the potential to elevate the brand perception of a product, while providing ample convenience to the end user.

Creating technical documents that are attractive, interesting, and easy to navigate will help users understand the product better in less time. This in turn helps them to set up the product faster and use it with perfection. This results in higher customer satisfaction levels, coupled with more positive reviews. Needless to say, higher sales numbers are guaranteed.

How to Deliver the Best Technical Documentation

Identify Your Audience

Learning about your audience is very important to identify, if your documentation is aimed at developers, employees, users, and other similar stakeholders. This helps users understand the background, goals, and knowledge of the product or technology. Similarly, it helps you customize your document as per customer needs and changes as and when they crop up.

Create an Outline

A technical documentation warrants the need for an initial structured outline. Without this in place, generating seamless content can be challenging. An initial skeleton is a must, around which your documentation revolves. A smart mix of headlines, categories, sub-categories, and topics can greatly help in organizing and structuring your documents methodically.

Ensure Crisp, Clear and Lucid Content:

A technical document is a customer guide to enable ease-of-usage. Before your content reaches SMEs and peer groups, ensure at your end that your understanding of how the product/service works is reflected in your draft. Displaying your linguistic prowess will be of no use, if an existing/prospective customer isn’t able to comprehend the process or his queries are not answered.

Always remember: your customers are not you. The ability of a technical document to explain a simple/complex procedure to a wide spectrum of users determines its success. Make sure the applicability of the technical document takes precedence over other prerequisites.

Use Attractive Graphics and Illustrations

Supplementing your text with the right illustration, picture or diagram adds authenticity to your document. These tools provide directions on using a product or technology beyond textual representation.

For your customers, images help break the constant monotony of words and make the document interesting. Also, be sure to use appropriate captions supporting all illustrations. Captions can help bring context to the product diagrams and illustrations with clear directions.

Safety Precautions

Technical documents often contain steps, which require users to share confidential data. Your aim should be to address such challenges early on. Many directions or pointers redirect users to information sharing platforms. You must conduct a safety test at your end and ensure such a task ‘always’ redirects a user to a credible platform, without any margin for error.