The introduction of technology in various areas of day-to-day tasks has brought in end number of benefits for mankind. The technical writing services offered by various companies of India are comparatively better & much reliable. A technical writing company in India provides manual or technical documentation for products.
You need to identify the benefits of offshore technical writing services to India before you go ahead with the technical writing services offered by them. The main objective of any genuine technical writing company in India is providing the organizations with correct, right in time and quality documentation support for their technical products. Besides this any technical writing company in India is committed to find out and solve any of the technical problems faced by the organization and its customers.
The offshore technical writing services India offers are competitively priced and provide a much dependable solution to companies that are looking for off shoring the entire development of the technical documentation of their products.
The key benefits of good technical documentation include:
Growth in sales, as product information is easily accessible. Timely discovery and correction of any of the gaps or errors in the disaster recovery plan of a company. Business needs are reflected with the help of detailed and improved computer system functions. The superior quality of text makes training more effective. The development & finalization of user documentation results in an agreement between the IT staff & business department on system functionality. The functions of the products are also reviewed while performing final analysis of the user manual. Well-written procedures reduce the possibility of errors. The improved usability of products e.g. well written screen options and menu names etc introduces more clarity, consistency and correctness. As part of the documentation process, each and every feature of the product goes through testing process once again. Writing user procedures results in easy access to a completely rearranged computerized system. In order to take advantage of the offshore technical writing support services India offers, your business should fall under any of the following categories:
Original Equipment Manufacturers or OEMs, such as PC/PDA/Peripherals/Devices, can get their products documented from India.
Software publishers & application vendors can also get the manuals written for their products from any technical writing company in India.
Or any business that deals in technical products and needs documentation for them.
The companies that need cost-effective but quality documentation for their products find technical writing services in India the best option to go for. The best part of getting the documentation done with the technical writing companies in India is that they offer thousand times better quality at a fairly lower pricing.
Though competitive pricing is the chief stimulator that attracts more and more companies to avail the services offered by any technical writing company in India, the high rate of efficiency and timely delivery are nonetheless important.
You can take advantage of the first-class technical writing services offered by India. All you need to do is check the reliability & genuineness of the technical writing company you are going for.
In your User Documentation, you direct your Reader to perform tasks with your product. If you don't tell your Reader what to expect when performing those tasks, you will have a baffled Reader, resulting in dissatisfaction and expensive calls to technical support.
EXAMPLE: REVERSE OSMOSIS WATER FILTER
I bought and installed a Reverse Osmosis water filter. The instructions told me to fill, and then empty (the instructions foolishly used the term "dump," which would have caused the destruction of the system) the tank.
The filter had a capacity of about 100 gallons per day. Thus I expected the initial fill (4.5 gallon tank) to take less than one hour. After about an hour the tank was still filling. Worried, I called the technical support. I was told that it takes about two hours for the tank to fill.
One line in the User Documentation would have eliminated that call: "The tank initially takes 2 hours to fill." Not knowing what to expect I, and perhaps other Users, wasted the time and money to call the technical support line.
EXAMPLE: UPGRADING A ROUTER'S SOFTWARE
I had some problems with my Cable/DSL (Internet-Ethernet) router. The internal control panel made it easy to check for and download updates to the internal software. The system told me that it would take a few minutes to check for updates (good), but it did not tell me how long the update would take to perform once I downloaded the file.
Not telling the User what to expect in terms of time is a mistake. I started the update and after a few minutes of operation (was it working?) I canceled the process. I re-started it again, and decided to wait longer to see what happened. It took a few minutes longer, and successfully completed.
It would only take a simple phrase such as "the software update can take up to five minutes to complete" to reduce the User's anxiety.
PROGRESS INDICATORS (as displayed in a windowing environment) are often useless. Some go beyond 100%, others are logarithmic: they move quickly in the early processing and wait, seemingly at the end, for a long time while processing is completing. Consider making progress indicators relate to the time of operation, not number of files.
Some progress/activity indicators have nothing to do with the program they are associated with. I have used virus checkers that have abnormally terminated, yet the activity indicator kept on moving. Make sure that progress/activity indicators do reflect activity of the associated program.
FILE DOWNLOADS DO IT
Telling the User what to expect is not a new concept. If you have ever downloaded files, the download site will often tell how long the file will take to download, based upon your Internet connection.
EXAMPLE: YOUR PRODUCT'S INDICATORS
While most examples of "telling the User what to expect" deals with the time needed to complete an activity, others can be related to the indicators and performance of the product.
I have a small smart battery charger that has a red light for each of the battery positions. Unfortunately, the operation of these lights is impossible to understand, and there is no description of how they work.
Here's what happens. When you first insert the battery, the light illuminates. A short while later (the charging still has many hours to go), the light goes off. Sometime toward the end of the charging cycle the light may go on again.
This is clearly confusing to the User. The User's expectation is that when the light goes out, the charging is completed. This would result in a lot of User frustration, as Users would try to use "charged" batteries that were not charged. The developers of the battery charger should explain the operation of these displays.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Tell the Users what to expect as they use your product. Often this information is the amount of time it will take for an operation to complete. For other products, you may have to tell the User what the indicators mean.
Don't leave your document Readers confused or left to figure things out on their own. Doing so will reduce your Users' comfort with your product, and increase your technical support costs.
Both James Marriot & Barry Millman are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
James Marriot has sinced written about articles on various topics from Recreation and Sports, computers and the internet and Information Technology. RNCOS offers complete e-publishing solutions for your business. We provide personalized world-class content development and management solutions that are qualitative and result-oriented.. James Marriot's top article generates over 40500 views. to your Favourites.
Barry Millman has sinced written about articles on various topics from Writing. Barry Millman, Ph.D., has a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and an M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Psychology. Visit: