Product Voice Design Toolkit: make your product speak your brand voice

With this toolkit available on Miro, you will improve the relationship between your product and the people who will use it. Starting from the brand, you will define writing guidelines to design your product, while taking into consideration every copy and micro-copy detail. From the welcome message to the last error message, thanks to UX Writing.

The Product Voice Design Toolkit is available on miro.com/miroverse

Which is the last notification you received from your most used app today?

How did you feel? Did it have a coherent tone-of-voice at the time you received it or did it sound a little inappropriate? Was the writing style adequate? And, most importantly, did you recognize the voice of the brand that sent this message?

Whenever we interact with a product — physical or digital — we experience a brand.

This experience creates a relationship between products and its customers based on conversation. Curating this conversation, be it written or spoken — in case of a voice assistant — is the basis of good design. Why?

“Words are half of the design that people use.”

— Torrey Podmajersky, UX Writer at Google

And since words are essential, as Tangity’s design team, we felt the need to order our ideas.

We wanted to create a unique, practical, and easy-to-use tool to facilitate our work on each projects’ contents, which manage throughout the entire design process. So, we started with the brand, mapped its positioning, and highlighted the brand voice and its tone-of-voice. We thought of the product as a person and defined its personal behaviors with the users.

Place your brand in its quadrant: the same message can be expressed differently, according to the brand personality.

What is the product’s tone of voice according to the context? Move the dots to set it.

We searched for ways to determine how a product’s tone-of-voice changes depending on the situation and the user’s feelings in that specific moment. Because a welcome message is different from a message saying that your payment cannot be processed caused by a problem with your credit card.

Use the “Tone spectrum” tool to define how your product speaks according to different context during the journey.

We needed a tool that would synthesize all this and that would enable us to write easy-to-use writing guidelines that would later define the writing style, a glossary, and ensure even the tiniest copy was on point.

Certain words are more consistent with a specific brand: define which words your product uses.

No matter whether it’s the copy of a smartphone interface, the information you see while visiting a museum, or a notification from your car’s cockpit.

That’s why we built Tangity’s Product Voice Design Toolkit. And now we share it with the world, on Miro, so that other designers like us can use it and evolve it even further.

As said before, the toolkit has a practical purpose, so we kept our words to a minimum.

Here you can find the toolkit, along a few suggestions to get the best out of it. For any doubt about how to use it — or how we used it — feel free to contact us.

A big thanks to the entire Tangity team, because good things are only achieved together while working in the right places.