4 steps to creating content rules for your UX team
The journey for creating content rules for your product can be daunting. There are many different aspects to consider and processes to put in place. The first step is to write your Tone and Voice guide — the North Star for all questions about the brand and personality behind the written words inside your product. Decisions for your content rules will stem from here, so it’s essential to have a Tone and Voice framework before moving forward.
Now it’s time to think about scaling that one brand voice so that many different writers on your team can write in the same product and still sound similar. Your goal should be to create guidelines that enable everyone to write with the same language and make similar decisions about the words they use when they are writing in the product. This will help create consistency within the product itself and create some uniformity between all of your writers.
When you are a single writer on your team and have the memory of an elephant to remember all the decisions you make, it might be possible to live without the structure that documentation creates, but the moment that there is more than just one writer on the team, their brains must work as one.
At the foundation there are two elements to a content guide that are going to help you establish the consistency and process you are going to need to be more efficient with your UX content. A base of fundamental copy rules and product specific rules.
4 easy steps for creating content rules:
1. Establish a base
Realistically the bases of your content rules are going to start with a guide that looks very similar to one of two sources. You’ll need to decide whether your foundation is going to be based on the Chicago Manual of Style or the AP Stylebook. You can likely find an argument for either, but you’ll use one of these guides to make a cheat sheet for basic grammar, punctuation and formatting rules.
Here is where you can decide on some basic UX content rules that will inevitably come up. Such as:
· Does your company use ampersands? If so, where?
· Are you going to use sentence-based capitalization or title-based capitalization?
· How will you format dates and time?
2. Create rules after each new edge case
One of the easiest ways to start building your guidebook of UX content rules is to write down a rule every time you make a decision while working. If you pause to think about implementing a choice, take note. If you stop to look up what other companies are doing in the same situation, write it down. Eventually you’ll stop having to pause for every single screen you work on and be able to apply the rules that you’ve already created.
Questions you will likely encounter during your work on UX content:
· Do you put periods at the end of your toasts?
· How do you treat CTAs?
· Is there a formula for writing error messages?
· How do you handle salutations in your product?
Every time you encounter an edge case or need to dedicate brainpower to deciding a new choice in the wireframes you’re working in, turn it into a rule so that it’s easier for others to make the same decision that you did.
3. Add new rules to a working document
Your UX content rules style guide isn’t going to be a one-and-done kind of project. You will need to visit it often and new rules and modify things that are already existing. It’s a living breathing document that will continue to grow as you determine the rules that make the most amount of sense for the voice and style of your product.
4. Rinse and repeat
Having documentation for the things that are in your head is going to make it easier for you to create the consistency you are after in your product. It will help you scale and build a foundation that is needed for more than one writer to join your team.
The designers on your team will also find it helpful since they can reference your documentation instead of coming to you for every single word that shows up in the product- freeing up your time to do more interesting things like looking at the content from a higher level and creating a content strategy for all the stories that are being told within the product.
