As an OIT Technical Writer for the UX team, your role includes a hybrid of technical and UX Writing. This hybrid of skills and training makes you uniquely qualified for a variety of writing projects and positions.
What is Technical Writing?
Technical writing involves researching computer software systems and applications to create technical documentation. The documentation is often highly technical, and technical writers need to be able to simplify and maximize understanding for people with different levels of knowledge.
According to Technical Writing HQ, technical writers write user instruction manuals, integration guides, API developer guides, configuration instructions, in-platform instructions, and system operations.
What audiences do Technical Writers focus on?
Technical writers write for beginning users using a simple user interface and more advanced users using a more complex user interface. They also write for developers who need to understand the backend functions to make improvements, and engineers who need to understand business logic and system architecture to maintain and update systems.
What is UX Writing?
UX Writing involves applying UX research and writing any text on web pages to aid in a better user experience. They often write the text for buttons, popups, informational guide text, tooltips, in-app text, flow charts, research notes, and objectives and outcomes.
What audiences do UX Writers focus on?
UX Writers often work with UX Designers. Like designers, their primary audience is the front-end application user. In the case of flow charts, research notes, and objectives and outcomes, they write for UX Designers and Stakeholders.
How can an understanding of both UX writing and technical writing improve documentation and UIs?
Focusing on the user, like a UX writer, helps create technical documentation that is more accessible for people with a deep understanding of technical systems and people with little to no knowledge of technical systems.
Having research skills like interviewing, summarizing complex concepts, and gathering data, like a technical writer, can help communicate the importance of a simplified and streamlined user experience.