Our Introduction to Content Design course author, Vinish Garg, shares his thoughts on the differences and similarities between content design and technical communication, and gives his advice on what skills technical communicators can learn to advance their careers into the wider area of content design.
What is technical communication?
Technical communication is the practice of planning, writing, and publishing technical content to provide the right information to the users so that they can learn and understand how to use a product or a service.
“Technical communication is the process of defining, creating and delivering information products of information for use – for the safe, efficient, effective and sustainable use of products (goods, technical systems, software, services).” source tekom
There are technical manuals for digital products such as the Help Center, as well for the physical products such as our toasters. The goal of technical communication is to explain how the product works, how the users can use it, and to answer the users’ questions whether during their pre-sales inquiry, or while they are using the product.
What is content design?
The scope of work and the sphere of influence of content design is wider. Content design is planning user-centric content that is evidence based, and serves the organization’s goals, inclusively, and holistically.
It includes the branded content that is part of thewebsite and digital presence for marketing, sales, and support, and the product content for the in-product experience. Some big organizations have content designers working with content strategists and they define the processes and operational frameworks to ensure that both these functions support each other by using their respective skills and expertise.
One of the key principles in content design is user-centricity which means discovery and then synthesis are fundamental to plan the content that the users actually want and need.
A few quick references to help you understand content design are:
- What is content design, by Content Design London
- What do content designers do
- Content design guidance
I describe content design as below.
I use this description as the foundation while teaching content design in the masters program in content strategy, at Graz University (Austria).
The primary job of a content designer is to make the product usable for the users.
There is no defined standard that shows all you need to learn to be a content designer. However, a few skills and sub-disciplines are:
- Discovery and user research: Understand why this is important and how to design the discovery phase
- User stories, JTBD (Jobs To Be Done) (There are few more practices such as intent stories, product stories, or scenario mapping)
- Content models (optional, not all the content design teams follow the content models approach but these are incredibly important and useful to understand the content architecture)
- Content metrics
- Content and design systems
- Standards and principles (optional—sometimes organizations take care of the content designers’ capability matrix)
- Explaining to management how content design is different from content strategy, UX writing, content marketing, content operations, and other content-related practices or career paths
How technical communication is different from content design
By now, you might have got the idea that the scope of a technical communicator’s work is confined to product documentation, whereas content design takes care of all branded content (and sometimes the community content too, if there is a use case).
Technical communication serves or reports to customer experience, or to support functions. Sometimes we see them reporting to product marketing too.
Content design reports to product, or sometimes it sits parallel to and outside design and product as an independent function.
If you are working as a technical communicator and want to move to content design, there are different areas where you can develop your skills, depending on your interest and your strengths. For example:
- Discovery: If you love research, designing surveys and research methodologies, speaking to or observing people, and then doing synthesis of the research data
- User stories or Job stories: Planning stories for users’ actions, needs, goals, and their intent. There are different methodologies to do that—user stories are one of them. Jobs To Be Done is another framework where you write job stories to plan the content driven interactions for the design work.
- Content models: This is getting into the content architecture—identifying what type of content are required, how these are interconnected, building the relationships, supported by your understanding of taxonomy and the metadata of designing content types.
- Content and design systems: The design systems are around us for a few years now and now we see content as an important part of design systems. Some organizations have set up an independent content system too to support their content design work (example, Intuit).
- Content metrics: Defining the content success criteria for how well content supports the user’s goals and the organization’s goals.
In the beginning, you can keep the learning scope wide to have a basic understanding of different skills. Once your organization supports this function and there are multiple content designers to support this practice, you can explore certain areas deeper to strengthen your expertise in that area.
Want to know more?
Here’s a short sample video about Vinish Garg’s Introduction to Content Design course
on the Firehead Training Academy.
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