UX writing — How a content style guide can make the process more efficient
When it comes to defining strings for an app, it is never easy.
During the daily tasks of a UX team, there are often decisions to be made about which strings are the best fit for a specific situation such as a call to action button, a notification, or an entirely new screen.
Especially during the design phase of a new feature, the words communicated in a specific scenario can also have profound impact on the look and feel of a feature: colors, images, illustrations as well as choices across different components. Depending on what you want to express and communicate to your users, you have to make the right choices in terms of the proper words to use.
This is not the only issue to face though. If you are working on a product, what I found to be crucial to achieve a great result, is to clearly define the voice and the tone of that product.
In our case, this work is even more difficult since we are building and delivering a white-label product, that must work flawlessly for many customers and their different languages, environments, and configurations. We faced the complex task of defining a powerful yet common voice and tone for our communication while at the same time including “personality” for each customer’s specific circumstance. And of course, this also means collaborating with translators who, most of the time, are not privy to the exact context and reasons behind specific string choices.
The requirement
A few months ago, we were prompted to make the UX-writing process easier both for us (UX and Dev team) and for our customers.
After some research, it was clear that to provide strings in a more effective way, we had to build a content style guide.
The content style guide
Why is the content style guide so important? The first reason is consistency. Being in a company with many people means that everyone may have a different “style”, tone, etc. If UX writing is handled by more than one person in the team, at some point this can create inconsistency in the product.
The second reason is to have a reference for writing new micro-copies,without the need to rely on specific people in the organization.
Creating the content style guide
First step: research
The work has been divided into some steps. First the research.
Getting to know how others were handling the UX writing tasks has been a really useful journey. We had the chance to learn the best practices for UX writing and see how to apply them to our product.
In this phase, we collected the general rules that could fit our product and we wrote them into our guide, also applying examples to make things easier.
The importance of UX writing
The guide starts with the definition of UX writing, thus giving some context.
The UX writer has to be able to anticipate and detect the user’s needs. As Robert Plutchik said, all the feelings triggered, in this case by the words, push users to perform a specific action.
And this is why it’s fundamental to give personality to microcopy.
Definition of the voice and tone
The second and crucial part of the work has been dedicated to the definition of the voice and the tone of the product.
Being actively involved in this task was also a way to take a break and think in a deeper way about what we had been developing all these years.
We had the opportunity to learn which was the proper style and mood to apply to our application and define the tone for each kind of message used in the product.
The outcome of this effort was a tone map. We listed all the different kinds of messages we have in our product and placed them into a two-axis map, containing the chosen range of desirable tones (for example Concise-detailed vs Emotive-Neutral).
Each member of the team had a different color of sticky note and placed them on the map. Then we converged and the result was the product tone map, containing a clear indication of how each kind of message we have in the app should look like.
Conclusions
Before accomplishing this result, writing micro-copies had always been perceived as an arduous task. Each time we were approaching a new string it was like starting from scratch: it wasn’t only a matter of finding a good combination of words and inspiration.
The real issue was not having a reference or a guide that could provide a starting point for writing. We spent many cycles checking how we were handling micro-copies for a certain kind of message and this, most of the times, was not an efficient method. In addition, the development team was completely outside of this process and this often resulted in a lot of placeholders in the code while waiting for the final text.
The Content Style guide and the Tone map will help the team and the company create and deliver effective, clear and compelling communication to the users of our product.
In particular, the development team will be able to include drafts of the microcopies to put in the product, which in a second phase will be reviewed by the UX writing team.
In the UX team instead, every single person will be actively involved in the creation of new microcopies, not relying only on a few people anymore.
Isn’t it awesome?
Our product team is very excited about what we have been able to achieve. It will take some time for this process to become routine across all team members, but it has already made UX writing task easier to handle and the entire process more efficient.
