How we provide great technical writing services
Good technical writing creates clear information about complex products, machinery, software and processes. It delivers significant value because it adds to the customer experience, reduces risks, and supports digital transformation. At 3di, our technical writing services focus on four key pillars of good technical writing:
Useful
Easy to find
Easy to understand
Easy to maintain
Technical writing challenges we have helped our customers overcome
- Providing a dedicated technical writing resource, replacing stop-gap measures such as employees writing documentation “on the side”
- Improving the communication between silos in your business, such as engineers and content creators
- Using analytics to give our customer confidence that what they publish is actually what customers need
- Overhauling the process for planning, writing, reviewing, publishing, translating and updating your content, making it quick and efficient
- Helping customer’s content keep pace with rapid iterations of products or software
- Quickly updating ‘legacy’ manuals and ensuring information is current and easily accessible
Our technical writing services
Find out more about our technical writing services
Award-winning technical writing services
At 3di, we’ve been providing award-winning technical writing services since 2002. So, as an award-winning technical writing company, we can help you clearly communicate with your customers, employees and partner organisations about your complex product and how your organisation works. Our in-house team of professional technical writers has experience in many industries and has received numerous accolades at the UK Technical Communication awards (run by the ISTC) for creating information portals, writing API documentation and providing fully outsourced technical writing services.
Find out more about our services and who we work with below:
“A very impressive entry; clear and logical; well thought out and implemented. Road maps and detailed plans show how much care and consistent work have been applied.”
UKTC judges panel
“A good quality entry. Various types of software have been used to produce this entry yet the final result is seamless. It is a good quality product.”
UKTC judging panel
“(3di) are always there to provide help and advice, ironing out the inevitable beginner’s mistakes and streamlining our output to the advantage of both parties.”
Martin Wells, Technical Author at Timberwolf
““3di has the know-how, the relevant experience and the project managers to deliver our projects and adhere to our high standards.”
Josef Nosbuesch, Head of Documentation Management, Roche Diagnostics
“I was very happy with the result. The work was done quickly and professionally, and it was delivered in a format that allowed us to easily edit it when it required updating.”
Steve Moran, Financial Director, RPS
Expertise in many industries
We have experts in your industry
The individual 3di authors and translators who work on your content will understand your world, your audience and your priorities. We work in a wide range of industries, including (but not limited to):
- High-tech equipment
- Software development
- Medical devices
- Telecoms
- Fintech
- Robotocs & automation
- Consumer electronics
- Industrial machinery
How we work with you
With our 20+ years of expertise, we have honed our technical authoring processes. We make it as simple as possible for you – no matter how complex your product or how tight your deadline is. Here’s an overview of our process:
Initial request
We understand what you want to achieve, recommend the way forward and provide an outline budget to get started.
Scoping
You share more details about your priority product and what you need to communicate. Our team creates a plan and detailed budget for you to review.
Authoring
We begin authoring the content and building your technical content. You provide some input and feedback on early prototypes, alongside our own QA processes.
Delivery
We complete your content and fine-tune the final formats for publishing. You confirm you are happy with your technical content, and then we make it ready to use.
Six reasons to work with us
1. Outsourcing to our qualified technical writing team
Outsourcing to us allows your best people to remain focused on your core business, where their time is much better spent working on your product. Unlike other technical writing firms, we have a dedicated team of in-house technical writers. Technical writing is what we do every day, so we have lots of experience. Setting up tools and processes yourself is risky and time-consuming, but outsourcing the setting up of tools and processes to us will minimise these risks and save you time. We already have these in place and ready to deploy. We know what’s needed to make your content even more valuable than it is now. So, as a dedicated technical writing company, we save you the trouble and the headache of figuring everything out yourself.
2. Accelerated time to market – We are fast!
Your product is almost ready, and now would be the perfect time to write the content. However, you cannot devote core resources to it or wait to hire an in-house technical writer. Using our technical writing services, with our dedicated technical writing team makes you move faster because we are set and ready to go.
3. Compliance and safety
With complex and advanced products, comprehensive documentation is a must. We have experience following compliance rules for a given industry and making sure your documentation meets all required certification criteria.
Find out more about our technical writing services
4. Information design
To create information that really works, it needs to be designed. Within our niche field, best practices have emerged over the years and 3di has become an expert at knowing how to combine and deploy these for our customers. Because of this experience, we have proven Information Models for solving the needs that you’ll have, and we’ll adapt these based on discovery sessions and reviewing any current documentation. Then, our team of technical writers will recommend a flexible, modular mix of text, graphics, illustrations, and video for the range of outputs you’ll need.
5. Content marketing
Your technical and user documentation can be a powerful contributor to your content marketing strategy. Because we are a technical writing company with over two decades experience, we design and create information that can support the buying process, onboarding, day-to-day use and throughout the customer lifecycle.
6. Content analytics
We ensure that we focus on creating the information you really need with our design expertise. After we publish your content, we use a range of techniques to check how it is being used. The more we understand about the impact of the content, the easier it will be to deliver the returns on investment you expect. As a result, our technical writers will be able to focus on the content that matters, and recommend what’s worth writing, translating and publishing.
FAQ’s
Who will work on my projects?
The individual 3di authors and translators who work on your content will understand your world, your audience and your priorities. Our diverse projects have more in common than they do differences. No matter what industry we work in, or what language we speak, as writers and readers, we all behave in very similar ways. For example, designing an award-winning knowledge base for our telecommunication customer has to consider very similar issues to designing award-winning API documentation for Unzer. As part of starting to work together, we’ll recommend a combination of specific individuals from our own in-house team, or our network of freelancers. The range of roles we have includes:
- Technical writers – each with a technical background, and trained to work consistently but flexibly as part of 3di’s award-winning services.
- Localization Engineers – for when your content will need translating, ensuring your multilingual content is managed efficiently.
- Technical Illustrators – our technical illustrators have the expertise to create all the illustrations, graphics, and screen grabs your project needs
- Content tool developers – our tool developers make sure our team get the most from leading content creation tools, as well as our own in-house tools.
- Service Managers – our team of service managers are experienced at managing our multi-disciplined teams, and will keep your project on track.
- Freelancers – we have an extensive network of freelancers that we use to supplement our in-house teams and provide specific industry expertise when needed.
Visit the about us page to find out more about our staff and what they do at 3di.
What tools do you use to create my documentation?
We’ll use the tools that are best to deliver the technical content that you need. We also combine industry-leading content tools with our own in-house AI-powered tools to help our team deliver work more efficiently. The tools we use include, but are not limited to:
- MadCap Flare
- Framemaker
- Markdown
- VS Code
- XTM Cloud
- Git
- DITA
- Jira
- Confluence
- Azure
- Sharepoint
- WordPress
- Snagit
- Illustrator
- Inkscape
- Acrobat
- Excel
- Word
Visit our technology page to find out more about the tools we use and how we combine them with our bespoke in-house technology.
Can you work with my in-house technical writing staff?
We are quite happy to work as an extension of your internal writing team. We can provide consultancy on overhauling your tools and processes, manage one-off projects that require outside expertise, or simply add some extra authoring capacity if you are particularly busy. We can seamlessly integrate with your existing team and flex our services as you have peaks and troughs in demand.
We’ve been working with companies around the world for over two decades, and can easily adapt to your organisation’s style, preferences and preferred tools. We also have experience in a variety of industries, and no subject matter is too niche or complex for our team. We can bring our tools, knowledge, industry expertise, and multi-disciplinary team to act as your external writing team, and give you access to extra resources and expertise when you need them.
Visit our project delivery page to find out more about how we work with your in-house teams.
Do you have the expertise to handle industry-specific technical writing projects?
In short, yes. The slightly longer answer is, our in-house technical writing team have experience in a variety of industries – we’ve handled all manner of projects, including documentation for autonomous robots and automated warehouses, product guides for marine electronic manufacturers, information portals for multi-national telecoms companies, API and developer documentation for software developers – we’ve even made documentation for very expensive and bespoke pens.
Any gaps in our knowledge can be filled by our extensive network of freelancers, who supplement our in-house technical writing team. We typically have long-standing relationships with our freelancers, some of whom have become members of our in-house team, and some of whom have been working with us since we started back in 2002.
Visit our industries page to find out more about our expertise and the industries we operate in.
Where is 3di’s technical writing team located?
Our in-house team of authors are split between our four offices, located in Woking and Edinburgh in the UK, Krakow in Poland, and Guadalajara in Mexico. The location of our offices means we can align with our customers’ time zones in the UK, the US and Europe. We’re normally delivering our services remotely, but we can work on-site with you if need be.
How do you ensure the quality of your services?
3di is BSI audited to ISO9001:2015 standards and a member of the ISTC (the Institute of Scientific and Technical Communicators). 3di has also won numerous awards for a variety of projects, which you can read about on our awards and accreditations page.
So delivering quality to meet customer expectations has been a habit for over 20 years. We combine industry best practices with our own expertise, tools and workflows to make sure that what you receive from us meets your expectations.
Each customer’s idea of quality can be quite different, but we take it as a good sign that nearly every customer works with us on multiple projects or over many years.
Case studies
Oxford Instruments
Bespoke manuals ready to ship with complex machinery.
Kannegiesser
Find out how 3di created modular content, including localized versions, for a groundbreaking laundry system.
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