How I shaped the way Evermos communicates — UX Writing & Brand Personality
August 2024, marked as my first year as a UX Writer at Evermos. It has been an exciting journey as a one-man army who is responsible for Evermos and Everpro product copy.
To celebrate it, let me tell you a story of one of my projects! Let’s roll the tape back to day 1.
It was the very first time I jumped into the connected-commerce world, and it turned out to be really fun and challenging! First of all, I need to reshape my mindset from an ordinary e-commerce business model that is built from seller and buyer to a unique connected-commerce that consists of brand, reseller, and buyer.
This business model leads to a new perspective on how I should shape the message we want to deliver. Different roles, different needs, different goals. I need to empower our reseller with a variety of approaches so they can sell our brand’s product to get the commission.
One of the biggest obstacles that we faced is our reseller demographic. Our resellers have an average age of ~38 years, spread across Indonesia (but mainly Java), and ~60% are working as housewives. Even some of our resellers are in their 60s!
This is absolutely affecting the way we communicate our message. How should we write? What terms are easier to understand? Is it polite enough?
Luckily, we already have a personification model to represent Evermos. Please welcome, Eva and Momo!
Eva and Momo had been made before I joined Evermos. You could say that they are my seniors alongside Ali (you can meet him in Everpro; please say hi from me if you meet him!)
This personification really helped me a lot. I can write as Eva and Momo and pretend to be them. We also had Evermos’ tone of voice, which helped me outline the message and give boundaries.
My early months as UX Writer at Evermos have gone pretty well. But one day I started to question myself after looking at Evermos’ social media.
Hmm…, it doesn’t feel like Eva who’s talking. Wait, do we actually know who Eva is?
We also have other writers like copywriter, content writer, and social media. Do we have a ground rule to write as Eva?
I started to ask my manager, UX Researchers, UX Designers and many of my colleagues about whether they knew about who Eva is.
Turns out, there was one thing that we sadly didn’t have. A guidebook of who Eva is.
- Chapter 1: Initiating
Yup, it’s bummer that we don’t have a guidebook. This could mean that we might actually perceive Eva differently on apps, social media, and so on.
To fix this issue, I initiated a guidebook for a better understanding of who Eva is. This could also be used by other divisions to standardize our copy for users.
It all began with research. I compile the latest data of our users and insight from UX Researchers. Using all of that, I started to build Eva’s personality. - Chapter 2: Creating and Iterating
Building a guidebook/personality is a new challenge for me. I’m so glad that my teammates are supes! I prepared the deck and let them give comments based on their knowledge.
Based on the data and a couple months of acting as Eva while observing our reseller, I decided to choose Sincerity as Eva's main brand personality.
Sincerity is a personality type that shows wholesomeness, honesty, cheerfulness, and down-to-earth. It suits the most to Eva and our resellers, and it’s also in line with Evermos’ vision as a sharia compliance company.
Since I don’t want to make it longer, you could take a look at the final product of the Eva guidebook here. (Already edited to be consumable publicly.)
The deck was way better after a couple of iterations and feedback from my peers. It’s time to show the world what I made! (JK, not exactly the world. It was marketing, social media, customer service, and creative division.) - Chapter 3: Delivering
After hours of work, it’s time to present what was concerning me and offer a solution. The presentation went both ways. I presented the deck while also asking for feedback from the participants.
What I collected from that session was that they actually felt the same. Unstandardize ground rules on how to communicate as Eva might lead to inconsistencies across platforms. We also exchanged stories about how each of us communicated as Eva, and it was interesting!
The meeting ended with an approval of my deck. Eva’s brand personality and guidebook were officially applied to all Evermos platforms. A little fix here and there after the feedback, but phew, what a relief! - Chapter 4: Maintaining
This chapter might be the hardest. We need to maintain the guidelines to be well adopted on all of our platforms. To keep it on the right track, we decided to arrange another meeting to regroup and discuss the progress.
The second meeting was also held to discuss about another initiation from me, which is applying sentence case! (This is another good story; let me tell you on another occasion, okay?)
What I learned
I could say that it was a blast being able to produce a guidebook like this. Collaborating with other functions and divisions has developed me to be more cooperative. Not to mention that I also started with researching and was new to the business model. It helped me a lot to understand our users better.
I fully understand that what I made is not perfect. So, constructive and supportive feedback would be very appreciated.
Thanks for reading!
