There’s no denying that AI has become an immensely beneficial tool for tech companies, helping teams to work more efficiently and spend less on their processes.
When it comes to producing technical documentation, using AI can significantly speed up production. But, importantly, speed alone doesn’t guarantee the kind of useful content that your users expect.
If you rely too heavily on automation instead of thinking about how your users really interact with your product, your documentation will end up lacking the context people need to use it effectively. That’s why it’s so important to understand how your context in AI content in technical documentation fits into the user’s journey, rather than just churning it out as fast as possible.
Why Context Matters A Lot More Than Speed
Your technical documentation should, at the very least, answer the right questions at the right time. The issue with relying on AI tools too heavily is that they generate content based on patterns rather than on what your users want to know. That means they often produce explanations that might look great but are lacking the important context that users need.
For instance, an AI-created guide might explain features in isolation, but it might not be capable of showing how these features fit into the real-world picture. Without this context, your users will end up having to make a lot of educated guesses, which will slow them down and make them more likely to make mistakes during setup or when they’re using the product.
How This Impacts Your Support and Internal Teams
If your documentation isn’t offering clear guidance, it’ll be left to your support team to pick up the pieces. They’ll be responsible for responding to user questions that your guides themselves should have answered, and you’ll end up putting unnecessary pressure on your internal resources.
Your designers and engineers might even end up being pulled into support conversations just to explain something that your documentation doesn’t do a good job of covering. That takes them away from the work they’re best at, so you end up paying them for inefficient use of time.
How to Build Context Into Your Documentation
The good news is that building context into your documentation doesn’t necessarily mean getting a human to produce it all from scratch. You can generally still use AI to create the initial draft, then arrange for the content to be looked over by technical writing experts, like the team at DevDocs.
ven if you don’t want to pay to outsource your documentation creation from scratch, it’s well worth investing in a pair of eyes to give your AI-generated content a thorough read-through. A good technical writer understands the importance of context in AI technical documentation and knows exactly what to look for in a well-written guide, ensuring it reflects how users work in real life.
Ultimately, they’ll help you focus on context in the delivery, so you can use AI wisely to create content that supports your users and reduces friction across your product.
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