A Dyslexic’s Experience Fixing Spellcheck — A UX Case Study

The story of improving workflows by building and sharing a company-specific dictionary

Why call out being dyslexic? Because dyslexia really deserves the credit for this project. It was the catalyst for pursuing a positive workflow change that ultimately made people’s jobs easier.
Good job dyslexia!

A previous employer had a language all it’s own. Company-wide spelling errors became a huge problem. Due to the fact that spellcheck could not keep up with the company’s custom demands, the spelling errors were found during the Document Control Review (DRC) process.

Examples of the company’s custom demands:
Trademarks
Product names (approx. 1,750 products)
– product naming scheme involves mid-word capitalizations
Uncommon customer field-specific nomenclature
U.S. English vs. U.K. English

Spelling-errors resulted in huge process flow issues.

The DRC process consisted of “finished” marketing materials being reviewed by the content owners, the DRC administrator, a marketing liaison, and a group from legal and regulatory. Once spelling-errors were caught the files were sent back to our department to fix. The previous annotated files and post-correction files were then sent back to each member of the review committee for the second round of review and hopefully, approvals. All of this second round of reviews was done through emails.

The company is a global distributor which meant our department was responsible for U.K. English spelling as well as U.S. English spelling.

U.S. English vs. U.K. English examples:
realize vs. realise
color vs. colour
center vs. centre
organize vs. organise
recognize vs. recognise
You get the idea. There are many and the changes are slight.

We needed a tool that worked

Being dyslexic and having a useless spellcheck was scary. I started looking for ways to make my spellcheck useful again. I found approved product catalog files in both U.S. & U.K. English. Using the approved documents, I was able to build both U.S. & U.K. company-centric English dictionaries into my Adobe InDesign. Utilizing the case-sensitive function made catching the product names and trademarks possible.

Incorporating the approved catalog language into my custom dictionaries started producing better files. It didn’t take long for the review committee to catch on that I was working with a different system. The documents were faster to approve which made my manager’s job easier. She quickly asked me to add the dictionaries to her computer.

While I was updating my manager’s dictionaries she mentioned wanting this function in her Microsoft Office Suite. I thought it was a great challenge and began research. There were some simple tutorials online to build out a custom dictionary with some extra research needed for the dual language dictionaries. I figured out how to update both languages and implemented the updates to both mine and my manager’s computers.

Good news travels

News continued to spread resulting in the dictionary being added to the computers of the whole department, a Global Marketing Communication dept. My department head asked me to work with IT to see if we could somehow push out the Microsoft dictionary to the local campus (about 2,000 people).

Happy pop-ins from Legal and Regulatory started happening. Legal & Regulatory were extremely happy to have this burden alleviated. Comments like, “Document review isn’t even in my job description but I’ve been spending nearly a third of my week on it. The biggest issue is spelling errors.” Hearing that they would potentially be getting the dictionary themselves Legal asked me to train them on customizing their departmental dictionary. The company legal-specific dictionary improved the department's workflow, saving time and frustration.

Global dissemination

Working with IT was fun. We not only built and pushed the dictionary patch to the campus but also to the two sales regions of North America and the United Kingdom. This process took about 2 months for review and approval through the global IT channels.

I am so proud of this work. In case the custom dictionary would be helpful for you, below are the instructions to upload your own dictionary into InDesign.