Designing a new digital style guide, part 2

How we created our new digital style guide.

Last week we wrote about why we needed a more comprehensive style guide. This week, we go into how we created it.

How we got started.

The project began as we worked on improving content for our site relaunch. As we were writing and rewriting content, we would make a note of any controversial phrases, common misspellings or formatting issues. Things that were not covered in our existing style guide.

Sometimes, we researched as we wrote, making notes on whiteboards about our discoveries. We knew early on that these notes needed to be made into something sharable. We knew that everything we learnt was actually valuable knowledge for all of our web editors. In the form of a style guide, it could become a tool that went beyond what to do and explained why to do it. It could be a tool that empowered our editors to create accessible user-focused content.

A list of contentious terms and a list of questions.

The notes we put together formed the basis of our research when creating our new style guide. As well as a list of jargon to avoid, we had questions such as:

• Which spelling is best for those using assistive technologies?
• How does our use of capital letters impact readability?
• How (and from where) are users accessing our site?

Through this list, we wanted to find answers that would ensure our style guide would match our values. Once we had answered these fundamental questions we found that more specific issues were instantly clarified. We no longer pored over “Should we use ‘ensuite’ or ‘en-suite’ on our accommodation pages?” or “Do we need +44 before our phone number?” We had readability research to back up our guidance.

We continued building our list and we dove into research, working through question by question, topic by topic.

A lot of our questions related to accessibility and readability.

As a team we aim to back up everything we do with data and research. We spent time engaging with a project started by Content Design London: the Readability Guidelines.

The Readability Guidelines is “a collaboratively developed, universal content style guide, based on usability evidence”. The research that went into this project is thorough. We could have used it in-house but we wanted to make something specific to York St John University.

We would combine the research within the Readability Guidelines with research on our users.

We looked at where our users were located. We looked at how they interacted with our site, and what devices they used. We looked at how prospective students engage with Higher Education content in general and what they find most influential in their decision making.

We researched inclusive language and became aware of areas we could be uninclusive or ableist without realising. We looked at a lot of content that was submitted for our site, and how we could provide constructive feedback to make it more accessible and more effective in conversion. This enabled us to start shaping a style guide that was specific to the needs of our university.

We spent time exploring our site using assistive technology and researched how to create the most accessible content for our users. We want to make sure that no matter your circumstance, you can get the information you need from our website.

We looked at a lot of other style guides, content guidelines and tone of voice guides.

We read a lot of style guides from other universities and from companies we admired. Some of the most useful resources we found broke the boundaries of typical content style guides. An influential piece was A Progressive’s Style Guide. This guide helped us recognise our own biases and the unintentional ways we were not being inclusive in our language.

We loved Monzo’s Tone of Voice guide. It reminded us that short, user-focused content can still be content with personality.

We got to grips with the content elements of the WCAG: the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

We read a lot of research from pioneering companies like Nielsen Norman Group.

We participated in webinars and read blogs focused on style guides from our content operations platform GatherContent.

We joined the Readability Guidelines Slack workplace. This workplace encourages conversations around best practice. You can sign into it and join the conversation using this link.

We found ourselves with some challenges during creation and we worked to overcome them.

How could we structure the new guidelines? How could we make sure everyone understood the guidance? We tried to make sure every point in the guide included what to do, the reason why, an example of how to do that in practice and a link to research backing up our guidance.

While we found great supportive data for a lot of sections of the guide, sometimes no research had been done. Some questions remain on the research to do list.

When there wasn’t external data, we did what we could to find an answer. We took group polls of how you would expect terms, phrases and names to look. We overcame challenges by working collaboratively and by researching in every way we could.

Backing the project up with data meant it took longer to produce than we first envisioned. But, it means that now every time we get a question about why we do something a certain way, we have evidence that backs up our guidance. This has helped us get people in the wider university on board with new ways of creating content.

The style guide became a project that not only taught us best practice as we developed it, but helped us confront our own biases and assumptions about good content. It helped us align how we write with the values important to us, and produce a way of effectively sharing this.

Head back next week to read part three.