Technical communication in its traditional sense means technical writing, that is telling users how to complete a task. However, the field has evolved significantly over the last few decades, leading to the rise of many subfields that focus on different aspects of technical communication. The study of technical communication today involves a variety of topics related to content, users, and interaction between the two. Let’s take a look at some of these prominent streams in technical communication. 

Technical Writing

Technical writing means creating technical documents to guide users through a process. Technical documents come in different types, such as help documentation, installation manuals, and troubleshooting guides. They also come in different formats – printed, online, or both. 

Technical writing is a cross-functional collaborative process consisting multiple steps and involving various experts. Technical writer leads the process; however, the process also involves subject matter experts – people who have in-depth knowledge about the product or the user. For example, an engineer working on the product or a sales manager who understands the customers really well. Technical writers collaborate with subject matter experts to get the information about the product and prepare a draft. Subject matter experts review the draft for accuracy and suggest improvements. The writer then revise the draft before finally publishing it in a book or on a website.

Information Architecture

Any technical document seldom exists on its own. More often, it’s part of a bigger content repository. This is especially true for large organizations that have a massive amount of content.   Such a massive repository of content is like a city. Without proper planning and navigation, it’d be hard to manage or get anywhere. 

Just like town planners design cities, information architects design information libraries that help users find what they want where they want it with minimal efforts.

Information Architecture Institute defines information architecture as “the practice of deciding how to arrange the parts of something to be understandable.” It describes a good Information architecture as one that “helps people understand their surroundings and help them find what they are looking for, in the real world or online.” 

As well-known information architects Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville describe in their book, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, information architecture revolves around four components: 

1. Organization Schemes and Structures: How we categorize and structure information
2. Labeling Systems: How we represent information
3. Navigation Systems: How we browse or move through information
4. Search Systems: How we look for information

Information architects also study how information design, metadata, vocabulary, and algorithms affect the user’s experience with the content.

User Experience

User experience or UX is a design-oriented field that focuses on creating delightful and usable products or services. Don Norman and Jacob Nielsen, renowned user experience experts define UX as a field that “encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products.” As they describe further, a good user experience is a result of multiple disciplines from engineering to marketing to design. 

The United States government, on its website dedicated to the field, describes UX as a field that “focuses on having a deep understanding of users, what they need, what they value, their abilities, and also their limitations.” 

UX experts study how users interact with a product. They design the product in a way that allows users to achieve their goals quicker and more efficiently while leaving them with a positive experience. 

Instructional Design

Instructional design studies how people learn and remember new knowledge. It uses this information to create online educational materials aimed at maximizing knowledge retention.  InstructionsDesign.org, a resourceful website on the topic, defines it as “a process by which instruction is improved through the analysis of learning needs and systematic development of learning experience.”

Instructional designers work in the education and learning industry – universities, schools, and eLearning companies. They support teachers, instructors, and professors in designing effective digital courses for their students. Many instructional designers also work with corporate organizations to develop training materials for their employees, contractors, customers, and other stakeholders.

Content Strategy

Content, no matter how good, will fail to attract customers or help users if it doesn’t align with the product’s objectives. Content strategists take a wholistic view of an organization’s content and tie it together in a way that help users take a full advantage of the orgazation’s product offerings.

Kristina Halvorson, a prominent figure in Content Strategy, defines it as “the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content.” It is a field that focuses on “getting the right content, to the right people, in the right place, at the right time.” Content strategy “connects an organization’s content efforts with its business objectives.”

Other related fields

In addition to these well-known fields, there many other areas technical communication touch. Some of these are:

• User research: study of users and their environment, behavior, needs, etc.
• User interface design: designing an intuitive user interface to facilitate the user’s interaction with the product.
• UX writing: writing guiding text in an app or a website, including naming menu items, writing actionable error messages, writing user-friendly dialogs, etc.
• Accessibility: making websites and other products easy to use for disabled people.
• Information design: using visual elements of text to make content easier to navigate.