Communicate complex ideas with content that speaks directly to your audiences
Don’t overlook the complexity of your content. Most users don’t need the level of detail and complexity we may think they want. Make sure technical information is helpful to your users by creating content that they can easily use, understand, and act on.
Why simplify technical content?
Increase understanding
Focus on the information that’s most important and relevant to users, without losing important meaning.
Drive action
Increase customer conversions with content that’s easier to understand and act on.
Remove barriers
Ensure that every user can understand and benefit from your content, without being slowed down by complicated text.
Promote customer self-help
Help employees feel Provide users with resources and documentation they can use themselves, and reduce the amount of time you spend supporting them.
Why well written technical content is important
Important information can get lost in unknown jargon, internal lingo, and excessive details. But most of the time, the writers putting together the content don’t realize or intend for the content to be confusing. More often, they’re writing content from their own experiences and knowledge, and don’t realize that not all users share that knowledge.
When you’re communicating technical content, you need to understand who you’re writing for, and how they understand and use the content.
We can help:
- Conduct user research to discover who your target users are, what their needs and expectations are, and what their level of understanding is on the technical subject.
- Align internal stakeholders on your technical content’s needs, goals, and constraints.
- Work with internal stakeholders to align on a communication approach.
- Provide writing services to audit your existing technical content, and revise and write new content.
- Lead training and workshop sessions with your content team on how to write plain language content.
- Create writing standards and guidelines that contribute to sustainable and maintainable content.
We can help plan, write, and publish technical content that’s useful, concise, and easy for your target audience to understand and act on.
Client highlight
BCHydro call center staff rely on an internal information repository to answer questions and provide support to customers over the phone. The documentation they were using consisted of over 8000 pages of technical content that was difficult to use and navigate, and was written using terminology that customers didn’t understand. We worked with BC Hydro to redesign their call center documentation and develop a new solution for their complex content.
Project highlights:
- Estimated $240,000/year in savings for BC Hydro.
- Reduced content by an estimated 60%, from 8000 to 3000 pages.
Project activities:
- Established consistent content structure by developing standardized content types and models.
- Enabled the creation of higher quality content by establishing content standards and training authors.
- Reduced content by an estimated 60%, by simplifying the technical documentation and removing duplicate content.
- Developed a glossary of terms to develop a shared understanding of terminology, abbreviations, and acronyms.
“ As an organization, we use a lot of jargon and complex language that doesn’t reflect our audience’s vocabulary. Content Strategy Inc. has helped us shift our overall language and tone across the board.”
Brandon Young | Manager, Digital Communications
About BC Hydro
BC Hydro is a Crown corporation that provides clean energy to the province of British Columbia. They maintain an in-house call center to provide customer support.
