Don't believe the myths about technical writing

“I don't think it's something for me — it sounds boring," a friend said when I told him about my role as a technical writer. “It's not boring. You learn a lot, talk to many people, and create content for real users," I replied. During our conversation, a few myths about technical writing emerged. Let's dig into them — they may prevent you from achieving quality and delivering value to your clients.

Written by: Andreas Grönvall Mikkelsen

“It’s not creative”

Technical writing isn't like creating art, music, film, or literature. But in a broader sense, creativity is about approaching challenges by finding new perspectives, exploring domains, and connecting the dots. It's about discovering possible directions and shaping ideas. You decide which to pursue – perhaps you need to go back, rethink, and start over. The result of the process is something with meaning and value to someone. A technical writer follows all those creative paths.

Image: Magnific

Structure may not seem related to creativity. But technical documentation must fit within the right information architecture. Content must be easy to use, reuse, and maintain — and comprehensible to users. On top of this, it should be easy to find, in the right context, at the right time. All this takes a significant amount of creative work.

“Good design does not require user manuals”

This myth about technical writing ignores that users come with different needs, knowledge, and experiences. What is obvious to one person may be unknown to another. It’s easy to forget that there are user manuals even for everyday products like washing machines and smartphones — most of the time, you simply don't need them.

Solutions in areas such as aircraft, building automation, medtech, and food packaging cannot rely solely on UX and design. And educating users is often not enough, since there will be moments when they need to perform unfamiliar tasks, double-check hardware details, or verify configuration settings. Even excellent design cannot anticipate and solve everything.

Complex business solutions frequently need to meet regulatory and safety requirements and comply with standards that vary by market. This information often belongs in the technical documentation too.

We at informiQ recommend that you gather input on what your audiences need and expect before you start. Create the technical documentation in parallel with other tasks. Review it, polish it, and publish it. Track how audiences use it, analyze usage data, run feedback sessions, and keep improving.

“It slows innovation and release work down”

Imagine your company is about to launch an amazing food processing equipment that will reduce time-to-market and cut energy costs. As you put the champagne in the fridge, your sales manager texts: “We must ensure our offer is comprehensible, meets quality requirements, and includes all necessary safety information. Is the technical documentation approved?" If the answer is no, you have a problem.

Involve technical writers in innovation, development, and marketing teams from the start. Give them access to product owners and developers for workshops, interviews, Q&A, and review sessions. Your organization will gain insights, reduce uncertainty, improve quality, and better address audience needs.

Watch out for the myths about technical writing

My friend finally agreed that I had a point. Technical writing is creative in a way that is not apparent to everyone. Most products and solutions require technical documentation in order to be installed and used correctly, to keep users and equipment safe, and to follow standards. Integrate technical writing properly into your processes, and it will make everything run more smoothly.

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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?

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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.

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