How To: Create Product Content Guidelines

For the last year, I’ve been developing, implementing, and maintaining a set of content guidelines that help make language, style, vocabulary, and voice more consistent throughout our product.

Along the way, I’ve partnered with product designers, user researchers, product managers, and marketers and it’s been an unprecedented learning experience for everyone involved.

Below I’ll share my process, findings, and plans thus far for anyone interested in creating something similar.

What are content guidelines?

Even though it sounds formal and boring, content guidelines can breathe life into your UX and are an important tool for any product org.

• A source of truth for UI copy standards
• A shared resource for anyone writing, editing, or thinking about the content in our product
• An integral part of your design system and brand
• A tool to streamline production and promote consistency

But first, research

Before you can sit down and actually write a set of guidelines, you need to do some research.

Competitive analysis

Every smart design project starts with competitive analysis. See what’s out there, compare it to what you’re thinking, ingest the good and bad, and come out with an informed opinion about the direction you should take.

Mailchimp and Shopify are great examples of established content guidelines and served as inspiration for layout, sections, and how best to integrate the final product into a larger design system.

User interviews

Another important part of the process is conducting user interviews. Sit down with the people who interact with your content most — designers, PMs, customer support, and actual end users — to hear their thoughts on the current state of product copy, frustrations and pain points, and ideas on how content could improve user experience.

Hearing all of this firsthand really put our content problems into perspective and helped distill high-level themes — both of which would influence what areas needed more content rules than others.

Voice and tone workshops

In order to further engage people in your process (and drive awareness of the importance of having content guidelines in place), consider hosting some interactive workshops around voice and tone.

I created 3–4 light activities focused on uncovering our ideal attributes — who we are, how we sound, and what personality we wanted to portray in our product. Using whiteboarding, worksheets, and sticky notes, it was easy to visualize trends and use them to create a voice and tone everyone identified with.

Content audits

Ah, the famous content audit. Tedious but brimming with insight, take inventory of all the content elements of your website, app, and user journeys in order to better understand what’s working and what’s not. Typo? Screenshot it. Dead end? Screenshot it. Onboarding that needs more explanation? Screenshot it.

Doing this validated previous research and helped stakeholders (literally) see gaps in user flows and specific problems by feature area.

At the end of the research phase, you should have a solid opinion on voice and tone as well as general themes that will guide you as you begin writing. You should know what your UX lacks (consistency, personality), what your content needs to do more of (educate, guide), and quick win focus areas (empty states, CTAs).

Just write it

After analyzing and circulating your initial findings, you can now begin writing your content guidelines! For me, it was easiest to start by outlining each section and fleshing them out one at a time:

• Goals and Principles
• Audiences
• Voice and Tone
• Grammar and Punctuation
• Naming
• Terminology
• Word List
• Components

Your sections may differ and that’s okay. Adapt them based on what makes sense for your company.

Throughout the writing process, I gathered stakeholder feedback and revised accordingly until we all felt good about what the guidelines represented. Once we got to that “final” draft, we used Contentful to host the content and built an internal wiki page similar to the other style guides mentioned above.

Educating the masses

So your content guidelines are coded — we’re done, right? Not quite. Now’s the time to start shipping your finished product internally. Get people familiar with the wiki, walk them through it, give them access and encourage questions and feedback. What made sense to a UX writer and Design Director might not to an engineer or PM.

For maximum visibility, I presented ours at a monthly all hands. In true TLDR; format I highlighted best practices, processes, and next steps. Anything you can do to showcase the value of what you’ve created will help with org-wide adoption.

For added measure, I’ve also started putting together a curriculum for bi-weekly content workshops to immerse people in UX writing best practices as they relate to our product. It’s a great hands-on way to get teams actively using and understanding how to apply the guidelines in their day-to-day.

Update, implement, test, repeat

In tandem with education comes execution (or, putting your money where your mouth is).

Make an implementation plan. Based on your research, what areas are a top priority? What content needs the most updating? Seek out quick wins (a login experience, a settings page) and work strategically to align with company OKRs to make the most impact.

Once you decide on a focus area, partner with a PM to sprint plan copy revisions alongside design and engineering. Content QA everything before it’s pushed to production. Test, revise, and repeat. Then give yourself a huge pat on the back because there’s nothing like seeing your writing out in the wild (and hearing what users think)!

I started small to test my implementation process and eventually adapted it to larger, more content-heavy features, working collaboratively across most of the product org.

Next Steps

It’s been a long 12 months (and counting) but creating our product’s content guidelines has taught me so much.

The most important lesson here is that this sort of initiative will always be a WIP. View your guidelines as a strong foundation for product copy but always allow room to adapt and change as your product (and users) do.

And remember, your job as a content designer is never finished. You’ll need to be a constant advocate for great UI copy but eventually, all the hard work pays off in the form of a better, more consistent user experience.

This article was originally published in UX Collective.