Creative and technical?
Early in my career, someone once said to me “creative writing and technical writing are not mutually exclusive”. I’ve thought a lot about what that means in the years since.
We wouldn’t typically associate creativity with technical documentation. After all, technical documentation is meant to focus on facts and details, and be, well, very technical about everything.
However, we would be doing our customers a great disservice if we separated creativity from our documentation. This doesn’t mean that customer support would suddenly be inundated with plot, character development and a personal voice, but rather that we consider our customers’ problems from a variety of positions and find one or many solutions to that problem. The solutions are not always the obvious ones; this is where we must be creative writers.
Let your creative side bring out the best on your technical side.
When approaching issues with documentation, first perform a thorough analysis. The root cause analysis can also be a creative process, where we need to take time to understand the problem, which may be different from the complaint. We do this using our experience and relying on our gut feeling, and networking with our subject matter experts to understand what went wrong. Then we figure out why the problem exists – was there a technical limitation? A mismatch of user expectation and writer intent? A misunderstanding of the customers’ needs? After we do a critical analysis of what the customers’ needs are, onto the creative part – a solution.
Whatever the needs are from technical documentation or customer support, it is worth taking some time to fully understand the problem. This requires considering every element of the product and what new and creative solutions could work best for the user. Being innovative about our documentation is key to our customers’ success.