Don’t sleep on your tech writer’s competence

Be honest - how early in the process of a new software project do you include your tech writer or UX writer? If you’re not including us from the start, you’re sleeping on tech writer competence.

Written by: Karin Askeroth

The job us writers in tech do is about viewing things from the end user's perspective and understanding what they need to learn. For us to be able to do as good a job as possible, we need to be given as good an opportunity as possible.

Worst case, we’re included as an afterthought. This creates a difficult situation for the writer who has to quickly produce at least the minimum needed for product roll-out. This brings a risk of mistakes and insufficient information. 

Best case, we’re included from the very start. You may think: “there’s no text needed at this point”, and you’re correct. The point of including us from the start is that it lets us get to know the product at a deeper level, plan our time, and gives us ample time to produce high quality deliveries that meet the deadline.

Bringing us into every phase — from initiation through testing — leads to better products, clearer communication, and fewer last‑minute scrambles.

How to include your tech writer

There are no downsides of viewing your tech writer as a natural part of every project phase:

• Initiation: In this phase, allow your tech writer to listen in and get a feel for the purpose of the project. We will get information such as time plans and goals that will help us better plan our time ahead. The rest of the team starts getting to know the writer.

• Planning: In the planning phase, your tech writer gets important information about details you may not realize are important to them. This can for example be from important interfaces such as testers, product developers, installers, and customer support. Your tech writer will start to get a deeper understanding of functionalities and can provide valuable insights about human behaviour that may not be considered this early in the project.

• Execution: Except for working on documentation, user guides, or microcopy, your tech writer can work closely with both UX/UI designers and developers to find the most user focused solutions. 

• Test: Again, include your tech writer. We will help you find any inconsistencies, as well as get a better understanding of how well our texts really work. Let us improve our texts now instead of after the product rollout.

Our advice to you 

Tech writers add the most value when we’re included from the very beginning of a project. This allows us to understand user needs deeply, and plan high‑quality documentation. Bringing us into every phase — from initiation through testing — leads to better products, clearer communication, and fewer last‑minute scrambles.

What do you see that a tech writer can do for a project except for providing technical texts?

Letting our spirit shine over the informiQ brand

A while ago, we saw the need to rework our brand, to better show who we are and what we can offer. We asked Andreas Grönvall Mikkelsen, who led the brand work, about the how’s and what’s of the work that was done.

Written by: Andreas Grönvall Mikkelsen & Karin Askeroth

Photo: Andreas Grönvall Mikkelsen

What made you decide it was time to rework the informiQ brand?

Our message and offering was a bit unclear and shattered. We saw a need for an update that better incorporated the needs and expectations of our audiences. But we also wanted to let our spirit shine its light over the brand a bit more.

What goals did you have for the branding project?

The main goals are to create clarity and consistency. That will let us focus and align our activities and communication much stronger. To achieve this, we defined several goals in different areas. For example, the goals consider our clients and employees, but also what we do in our social media channels. We’ll follow up on the goals over time.

What did you want the informiQ brand to communicate to our audiences?

One important activity was to define and agree on our core values. By doing this, we could more easily use them to communicate who we are and how we work. Another major aim was to reconsider our offering and agree on how we should communicate it, to make it easier and more inspiring for our audiences.

Core values are very much about our reasons to be, our culture, what we’re good at, and how we make our audiences understand all of this.

What did the branding process look like – what steps did you go through?

We conducted an employee survey and did an inventory to see what we had and what we’ve done over the years. There were some recurring and integrated main activities during the work. For example, we interviewed key stakeholders and ran several creative workshops. It was an agile process in which we had to take care of ideas and stuff that popped up.

Screenshot from informiq.se

How did you involve your informiQ colleagues in the branding journey?

Mainly through the employee survey and the workshops. But several of the employees were also participating in meetings where we went through strategy, ideas, proposals, and goals. We encouraged employees to provide feedback and to challenge our suggestions.

What was the most challenging part of the project?

As we came closer to our rebranding launch, we found out that some vital pieces of content were missing, so we needed to spend more time doing research, workshop, and to create that content. The launch was pushed a few weeks and that required resources, additional time, and extra patience!

Screenshot from informiq.se

How did you decide on the core values and messaging for the informiQ brand?

Core values are very much about our reasons to be, our culture, what we’re good at, and how we make our audiences understand all of this. Regarding our messaging, that’s where everything in the rebranding work comes together – in its essence, messaging is prioritized and selected strategic activities with certain goals, translated into the right kind of communication to our audiences.

Read more about the informiQ brand!

How we help make your brand stronger

What values do we at informiQ provide your business? What does branding have to do with it? As we reconsidered our own offer and how we communicate it, we found out that branding is essential in everything we do.

Written by: Andreas Grönvall Mikkelsen

Branding comes in many shapes. They might be witty billboard headlines, talk of the town Superbowl commercials, or ads flooding your social media feeds. But the field of branding is much more than creating awareness and gaining leads.

"We have gone from product to process, from problem resolution to emotion seeking, from object to experience," Idris Mootee wrote in his modern classic 60 Minutes Brand Strategist more than a decade ago. Today, we still see a focus on experience – your audiences' needs and expectations change in different contexts over time. There’s a strong need to create, follow up, and tweak experiences throughout the user journey.

The audiences have the answers

In our assignments, we often need to consider the user experience in different ways. This is why we made Experience Communication into one of three strong pillars in our offer. Brand personality and tonality guidelines affect what texts our UX writers create and how they write them. Branding is also key in our technical writing, although this is often a matter of after-sales content, such as user manuals and online help. Many of our clients are associated with quality, safety, and long-lasting solutions. Having the audiences in mind, we need to create clear, concise, and comprehensible content – such as texts and illustrations – that follow brand guidelines.

Foundation and know-how is branding too

The second pillar of our offer is Processes and Quality – our consultants lead and support our clients’ work with content, experiences, and deliveries. We ensure solid structures, optimized processes, quality assurance, and much more. These activities are vital to brands that are known for reliable best-in-class solutions that must reach the market at critical moments. So we actually do branding in those areas as well!

Think ahead as the world changes

What about innovation and taking your business further? The third pillar of our offer is Business Development – we level up and add value thanks to our seniority and knowledge of strategy, improvements, and business analysis. For example, we are improving collaboration and cost control at a groundbreaking research facility. This helps lay a solid foundation for the innovations that audiences and society need and expect.

Telling your story

Your branding is like a story told in new ways as the world evolves. The story creates emotions, so you have to be aware of what kind of emotions your audiences expect – from the first impression to the most long-lasting relationship. This is why there's always a need to develop and improve people’s experience of your brand.