Micro Content in Technical Writing
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Many content creators, technical writers, and other authors face the problem of content form choice. Content forms have the following classification:
Long-form content provides a lot of information on the topic to say nothing of its depth. The length may vary from 700 to 2000 words. The most vivid examples of long-form content are ebooks, blog posts, user manuals, tutorials, instructions, white papers, etc. In other words, it is a separate document.
Short-term content contains up to 1000 words. It provides readers with relevant information but in a short way. It is more effective than long-form content. It is easy to read and perceive, it is more lightweight. The essence is to tell the audience about one idea or to deliver one message quickly and efficiently. Examples of this type of content are infographics, short news articles, social media posts, etc.
As we are surrounded by tons of information, our attention span is only about 8 seconds or even less. We don’t want to waste our time dealing with unnecessary information. We want to see easily scannable and highly efficient pieces of content. And here is the point where micro content comes in.
This term appeared in 1998 in one of the articles by Jakob Neilson, a usability advisor. Step by step, the term became very popular in such spheres as technical writing, marketing, UX/UI.
Micro content (micro-content or microcontent) is the type of content (image, text, or video) that can be perceived in a time span less than 30 seconds.
The term itself might be unknown among broad audiences, but everyone has surely seen this type of content a lot of times. Social networks widely use it every day. The main distinctive features of microcontent are the following:
The greatest thing about micro content is that it clearly shows the value of your message. Customers won’t have to spend time reading and reading lines of text. The essence is on the surface. Here are the examples of micro content in technical writing:
Even snippets in Google are considered to be micro content. Snippets in Google are brief extracts from a webpage that you can see in the search results. They are automatically pulled from web pages indexed by Google. And they give quick answers to users’ questions. Though actually, this content is not micro content on a webpage. Even voice search results can be represented in the form of such micro content. Here is what a snippet in Google looks like:
Micro content is a special type of content that offers benefits both for technical writers and for readers:
Creating micro content in technical writing is not as challenging as it may seem at first. Follow these simple rules, and you’ll get great results:
ClickHelp, as a technical writing tool, offers great functionality for more convenient and efficient use of all types of content, including micro content. These are variables and content snippets.
Variables help authors update documentation. It works like that: imagine you have a manual in which you need to update small but very important details like company name or product version. I guess no one wants to look through the whole text to find them and change manually. You can simply create a variable for company name or product name, assign a particular value to it and change rapidly throughout the whole documentation project.
Content snippets help to work with bigger pieces of content. Some information should be used in every manual of a company. Sometimes this information must be updated. When authors copy and paste pieces like that, it is a great problem to update them. How can you do that? It is impossible to check all the places where it is used. Obviously, a lot of mistakes will be made. You can create a content snippet and reuse it when you need it. If you update the original snippet, the content will be changed everywhere.
If you want to learn more about single-sourcing techniques, read our post – ClickHelp – Single-Sourcing Techniques.
Microvideos are rapidly gaining popularity in online technical documentation. A situation like that takes place as microvideos are 100% efficient when you need to attract users’ attention to information and, at the same time, reduce the cognitive load. Here is a good formula for creation of microvideos:
You can find more information about how to create videos, which video hosting platforms to choose, and how to gather feedback from videos in our post – Tips to Make Instructional Videos.
Micro content isn’t something widely known, but it is widely used. It allows to boost the performance of technical documentation, and, of course, is highly appreciated by users. Does that mean that technical writers should concentrate mainly on this type of content? The answer is no. Create diverse content for different purposes and combine them in your technical documentation.
Good luck with your technical writing!
ClickHelp Team
Author, host and deliver documentation across platforms and devices
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