How I crafted the new voice and tone to a product: clarifying values and attributes

For the last five months I’ve been working as a UX Designer at Ton, a Brazilian financial company focused on payment solutions for micro-entrepreneurs. It was cheery and challenging because I got in the company to help with many changes, from the rebranding to the product’s relaunch. And these changes included working with a new team to start developing UX processes, methodologies and cultures. And that’s how I found the opportunity to start creating and perpetuating the UX Writing culture too!

That meant I had the double job of being UX Designer during most of my time, and implementing a UX Writing project on and off — which was good because I got to know the whole product and the audience to whom we were developing.

Well. For starters, I was decided for only mapping and reviewing what we already had in production — oh, yeah, we also took care of the product that was already working while redesigning the new version -, so I focused on what was vulnerable for our user and that could solve its problem for awhile.

I followed one of Yuval Kesctcher’s pieces of advice, mapping and describing all we had: microcopy, forms, buttons, error messages, empty states…! I did it on Figma since I have familiarity with it, but you can simply take screenshots of your product to create a described document.

That’s when I noticed we didn’t have a defined voice throughout the product. And that was a problem because having a personality is what can make you be you or be one more. Personality is what crafts identity and identity is what shapes identification with users. That’s what makes them love our product (in addition to features and service, of course). So I needed a plan.

The Plan

Interviewing stakeholders

We needed to start from somewhere, so I started by checking all of our competitors’ websites and products to map what was nice and what it wasn’t in terms of conversational writing and why.

After that, I went through Stone Co. design and branding documents to extract some of the essences that Ton should bring since we’re part of them.

That’s was my start line to seat with four stakeholders of ours. I asked them a series of questions about the brand, the audience, purpose, what they expected of our way of being and what we wanted to be for our customers.

By the end of these four interviews, I had gathered a rich portrait of detailed information that could lead me into something concrete.

Getting to know our users

Although we had already defined our 5 personas, I needed real contact with our users to know how they talk, what they think, how they act. So I followed two processes for this.

The first one was shadowing calls and chats made by our Customer Relationship Team. This was very good to further elucidate our user’s pain points, what they don’t understand and what doesn’t make sense to them in terms of the difficulty of absorbing information and guidance.

The second one was going to structured user group interviews. With the help of an expert mediator to guide different kinds of dynamics, we dug into our users and potential users’ world to understand not only their reality and challenges, their dreams, their fears… but to get to know their vocabulary, their way of talking, their personality and most authentic phrases. And believe me, that made all the difference. How Kinneret Yifrah says: “users are the best copywriters”.

Then… I needed to translate all I had gathered into a scalable deliverable to stakeholders, what’s has always been a real struggle to me. I mean… it is not that simple when it comes to showing the rational process of something that’s is almost ethereal, you know? At least for me, giving life to a company’s purpose, translating their goals… that’s a lot, a whole world behind it, so subjective! And a big responsibility. But hey, that’s my job: to translate what some people can’t and make it better.

So, to translate the essence captured from each side (competitors, company, stakeholders and audience), I made use of the Kapferer Brand Identity Prism.

This prism is carved in Marketing and Advertising professionals’ hearts of the whole world, and I’m sure this is for the same good reason it was crucial for my strategy elucidation. It was a way for me to explain that a brand should have the capacity of being seen as a person with physique and personality, reflection and mentalization; as well as social aspects that can define not only its external expression but also inherent aspects.

With this argument in mind, I was able to clarify every little detail of vision, mission including values that I developed. And seeing people nodding as I was presenting was the sign I needed to know that I was ready to go to the next stage: the voice and tone, for real.

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To read the next chapter of this "novel", click here.