Impact of Technology on Technical Documentation

Before we even talk about the impact of technology on Technical Writers, let us try to understand what technology is in the first place. Technology is something which applies the concepts of STEM abbreviated as Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics in solving all the problems and providing better solutions to the evolution of the mankind. 

Technical Writing on the other hand can be described as: 

1. Communicating about technical or specialised topics, such as computer applications, medical procedures, or environmental regulations;
2. Communicating through printed documents or technology, such as web pages, help files, or social media sites; or
3. Providing instructions about how to do something, regardless of the task's technical nature".
4. Technology is evolving fast, and it is evolving at a much greater pace than ever before. With several advancements in technology, we come across several ways one can produce Technical Documentation.

Technology has changed the way people look at things nowadays. Everyone is connected to literally everything at any given point in time. This presentation talks about the Effects and Affects of technology on Technical Writers. It also talks about how can one epitomise several advancements of technology and yet maintain the quintessential characteristic of Technical Writers – keeping things simple.

Figure:  Various Teams in an Organisation using Technical Documentation

Emerging Trends in Technical Writing

Growth of Application Programme Interface (API) Documentation

The growth of APIs has seen a corresponding growth in the need for API documentation and interactive document environments. Without the documentation, it’s virtually impossible to use an API, as developers need to know what resources are available, where they are, and what parameters they will accept.

Increased usage of Agile Methodologies

Increased Use of Mobile Technology

Move towards Embedded User Assistance

We’re also seeing a move toward embedding user assistance into the application itself, without the need to go to the docs. We’ll be seeing more developments with Conversational User Interfaces, on-boarding screens and micro-content

Move towards a less formal tone

As technology becomes more part of our daily lives, we've seen a move towards a less formal tone in some types of documentation. This is a consequence of documentation being part of the pre-sales process, and users are generally less scared of technology than they used to be.”

These Things Will Remain – FOREVER

Before the release of the product

This Documentation is prepared before the release of the Product. Its purpose is to educate of instruct the stakeholders and customers on what exactly is the documentation set going to be; and to convince the team to buy a product or a service. 

After the release of the product

This Documentation is prepared after the release of the Product. Its purpose is to provide instructions to the stakeholders and customers on how to use the particular product or a service. 

THE PAST

• Technical Writers used to spend 80% of our time trying to make the system deliver what we wanted.
• Now we can actually spend our time authoring structured content and making it easier for our authors to contribute that.

THE FUTURE

• The major trend is that product documentation is now more often used as downloadable soft-copies of user manuals, brochures, etc. They rather download user manuals every time they need it for a certain product.
• Second major trend is that users easily accept visual rather than text type information. Assembly instructions, operational manuals, software interfaces – everything is now rather to be explained in video or 3D rotatable objects than text.
• A simple animated 3D assembly animation is much more effective than tens of pages of assembly instructions. It is sometimes so hard to explain complex products in 2D linear drawings. So the new features solve quite a lot of inconveniences and opens new ways of using technical documentation (not just papers anymore).
• Structured content would give us re-usability. And also reaching out to new devices, like Alexa, and other platforms where we can take this content, re-purpose it, not just within the document, but also get all these other values from structured content.
• Publish directly from our cloud publishing system to our support, or “Tier Zero”. It opens up whole new possibilities for us to rapidly deploy content to our end users
• Redistributing content quickly to different channels will be one of the metrics driving the adoption of structured authoring.