The business value of quality content

Photo by Houcine Ncib (Unsplash). Pictured: Woman looks through a magnifying glass. Is she checking quality of her content?

This week’s assigned reading, listening, and watching reminded me of why I’m so interested in technical communication, especially as someone with a library background whose primary professional purpose has been to connect people with the information they need. We write to help people, as Ellis Pratt states on Cherryleaf Podcasts’ episode on Document Quality Checklists. And if the content isn’t helpful, what’s the point of creating it in the first place?

When writing to inform, I think it can be easy to be so focused on what we want to say that we forget what we want the audience to know. I know that when I’ve explained something in writing to library users, I’ve gone into too much detail, created more text than anyone would want to read (especially in a hurry), buried actionable advice in large paragraphs, and used language that assumes the people reading are aware of the ins and outs of my profession.

I think I’ve gotten better at this more recently, but I still have written interactions with library users who respond as if they hadn’t read anything I’ve written. After reading about qualitative audits in our textbook and listening to Pratt’s podcast, it’s now clear that even if my writing contains the required information and it’s technically “well-written”, it should be reviewed again with the needs of the audience in mind. Are instructions easy to find and follow? Are unique or ambiguous terms defined? I plan on keeping the quality checklists from IBM, Peter Morville, Ilene Burnstein, and Cherryleaf nearby. (Cherryleaf’s is my favorite because it covers so much; accessible and “legally okay” are qualities I’ll be checking my professional writing for from now on).

Something delightful

You may have noticed by now that I really loved Cherryleaf’s podcast about document quality checklists because I keep referring to it. I was very happy to hear Pratt mention the business value of quality. Documentation that is hard to use can lead to frustrated customers, more calls to customer support, and the possibility that customers will stop using the software or service all together. Documentation that has incorrect or contradictory information can make the product look unreliable and cause customers to lose trust in the company. Quality technical communication is a valuable business asset that has the ability to lower technical support costs and encourage strong customer relationships. If it’s anything like library services, I’m guessing the value of quality documentation is probably something that business leadership needs to be reminded of regularly.

Something meaningful

There is more conversation about accessible spaces lately, but in my experience it’s still an afterthought in many workplaces. Perhaps we think of accessibility as something that needs to be requested by someone with a disability rather than something that should be available from the start. Online content is no exception, and I enjoyed Dr. Kim’s discussion of the WCAG guidelines and the “Writing for Accessibility” post from the W3 Web Accessibility Initiative. Things like providing informative captions for images take very little time and effort, and creating pages with structured headings and unique titles are helpful for those with reading disabilities and pretty much everyone else too. These are things I’ll be thinking about more in my future writing projects. If your audience can’t use your content, what purpose does it have?