When was the last time a user manual actually solved your problem? If you’re like most people, you’ve stared into the digital abyss, looking for a manual that isn’t there. Or if you’ve found one, you’ve slogged through safety warnings and legalese only to find that there’s nothing in there that helps you solve your problem.

As tech comms professionals, we know the problem isn’t lack of effort. It’s focus. Too often technical documentation focuses on how the product was built. That’s backwards. There’s little thought given to the people who will be using it.

The solution isn’t writing more, it’s changing our perspective so we keep looking forward, focused on what users want to achieve with the product. 

User eXperience (UX) practitioners working as part of product development bring valuable user-centred insights to the product development process. If you’ve worked on a team that includes UX practitioners, you know how valuable their insights can be in your tech comms work. They help us to keep looking forward, staying focused on users and their needs. 

What, though, if you don’t work for one of those forward-thinking organisations that factors UX into the product design lifecycle? Or if your org is low on the UX maturity scale? Even in low-maturity organisations, we can leverage UX principles and methods to gain that greater understanding of our audience that is so vital to effective technical communication. 

We can apply UX principles in our own tech comms work to gain more insight on our audience and produce better, more effective technical content.

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