Finding the LINE voice
In the summer of 2019, an intrepid group of writers at LINE gathered to discuss a fundamental question: what constitutes LINE’s voice? While each writer had a vague idea of certain aspects of the LINE brand voice, and regularly referred to a style guide brief in their respective languages when writing copy or product-related content, we had never really sat down as a group to map out a cohesive voice and tone design.
You might be wondering why collaborating on a voice and tone guide across languages is a worthwhile task. Ensuring your product maintains a consistent voice is crucial, and a far more foundational question than wayward terminal punctuation. A study conducted by the Nielsen Norman Group showed that users regard products that follow a consistent voice with a contextually appropriate tone as more professional and reliable than those that don’t. When aspects of a product convey a different personality from that projected in other elements, the user is left feeling confused. Having a voice and tone guide is also beneficial to writers. Knowing your product’s voice facilitates the writing process. When vacillating between word choice, you’ll have a clearer idea of your available linguistic options with a unified, coherent brand voice.
Crafting LINE’s voice: The beginning
To embark on the fateful exploration of LINE’s voice, we went to the drawing board with our company-wide mission statement, as stated on the LINE website.
Closing the distance: our mission is to bring people, information, and services closer together. In the world we strive to create, users will have seamless online and offline access to all the people, information and services they need in their daily lives — LINE is the gateway.
With this formidable mission statement in mind, and bolstered by our shared experience of having composed content for the service, we pondered on an overarching voice that encapsulates everything LINE represents as a brand. LINE is first and foremost a global messaging platform that aims to bridge communities together. As the people who belong in these communities could very well span a wide range of ages, genders, and other factors, we wanted to reinforce the idea that our writing should be accessible and serviceable to everyone. It’s also safe to assume that the people who engage with our content do so on a regular basis, for the mere fact that most people have a habit of staying connected with their loved ones quite frequently. As such, sounding like an actual person instead of a chatbot moonlighting as one was an equally important consideration in finding our shared voice.
Crafting LINE’s voice: The rocky interlude
Armed with a mind map and a lofty visualization that would surely propel us closer to a consensus, we ventured forth — only to encounter a series of linguistic hurdles.
You see, a unique thing about our team is that we work in multiple languages, often from different source languages. As a multinational team of writers based in Asia, and split between Korea and Japan, we write content in not just English, Korean, and Japanese, but also Thai, Indonesian, Mandarin, and Spanish.
To be sure, writing for a product that supports a diverse range of languages is an enviable position to be in. Whether writing for an internal or external audience, most writers’ modus operandi is to never aggrieve their readers, and having writers hailing from different backgrounds review the content for idiomatic expressions that could potentially cause offense usually helps us to avoid making such linguistic faux pas.
As impressive as it sounds, though, the subtle linguistic differences stemming from cultural peculiarities that can easily be resolved in content writing actually presented themselves as an obstacle as we dug deeper into big-picture discussions of the philosophy behind a brand voice.
One such issue involved a conceptual difference between English and Korean/Japanese regarding the need for a service to sound human. While greater strides have been made in the English-language IT realm for apps to sound like they were written by people similar to you or myself for its intended audience, UX design in the Korean or Japanese language places greater importance on creating a service that is written for people. While UX content can, and should, be written with the objective of empowering and informing the user, that it should also speak to them is less critical.
And thus the impassioned discourse continued.
Crafting LINE’s voice: The denouement
Operation “In search of the LINE voice” ultimately came to a jubilant end a few weeks after our initial discussion. A group of writers who each focused on a different language with unique nuances had come together, butted heads, and came away with writing guidelines on the LINE brand voice that worked for everyone. In doing so, we also adhered to our original goal of creating an overall, inclusive statement that could be applied across the linguistic spectrum.
Crafting LINE’s voice: The epilogue
It’s been a few months since the team’s tête-à-tête concerning matters of brand voice, but the guidelines we established live on through our content. While I can regale you with more tales of the arduous quest we as writers embarked on to shape the brand voice, I’ll save the pedantic soliloquy for another time and instead share the fruits of our labor. Read below for a succinct summary of our guidelines.
LINE’s VOICE
At LINE, we bring information, services, and people closer together. Our writing reflects this spirit. Closing the distance means knowing who you write for, writing to be understood, and thinking from the reader’s point of view.
LINE is CLEAR
If nothing else, text must be understood. Trim away unimportant information to make the main ideas impossible to miss. Part of this means using consistent language and terminology, but when choosing between consistency and clarity, go for clarity.
LINE is CONVERSATIONAL
Our job is to translate the complex into the simple and intuitive. This means always speaking the user’s language. Even when delivering complex, technical information, it’s best to stay human. By providing text inputs that reflect what the user wants, we should let users feel that we “get them.”
LINE is CONSIDERATE
We never know exactly who our users are, but we still have to think in their shoes. Avoid assumptions and keep the user’s goals in mind. A considerate writer makes things easy by preparing solutions for problems ahead of time.
