She/her
Content Design Guidelines
Do We Use Title Case? Do we use sentence case?
How do we create consistency across the product experiences and increase efficiencies for our content and product designers?
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With a source of truth: Content Design Guidelines
How it started
I created Root’s original Content Design Guidelines (then called our Product Editorial Guidelines) to support a consistent voice, tone, and user experience throughout the app, and as a guide for the new UX writers that I was onboarding.
Until that point, I had been the only UX writer, and the product design team was very small. But as we began to scale, I saw the need for a source of truth for writing product content.
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A snippet from the original guidelines
How it's going
I have recently started a 6 month project dedicated to revamping our Content Design Guidelines—creating a much more robust set of guidelines that define and guide how we think about things like:
• Naming at Root (new feature names and new product names for B2B and B2C)
• Accessibility
• Inclusivity
• Copy within design system components
• Human-centered design
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Why we're doing this
The goal of these updated guidelines is to create a source of truth that can be referenced for consistency of messaging across our products, creating an experience for customers that is reliable, trustworthy, easy to navigate, and that takes them into consideration at each step of the journey. By removing the cognitive load associated with disparate and differing micro-experiences within the product, we can give the customer one unified, simplified experience.
Inspiration
There are several companies that have inspired our new approach to our content guidelines, including Intuit, Mailchimp, Apple, DuoLingo, and Better. We aspire to have content guidelines that set the standard within the discipline in the same way.
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Where we're at
The other content designer on my team and I have mapped out all of the sections for our new guidelines and have created all of the content in a Google doc, so we could easily go back and forth, comment, and update.
A sampling of what these guidelines will include:
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The basics, with things like punctuation.
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We're instituting lists to make it easy to scan and find the information you need.
Accessibility and inclusion, through language choice and always considering the customer
Content frameworks to promote consistency and clarity within design system components
Medium-specific content considerations and goals, especially to help a writer get started
What's next
The first iteration of these guidelines will live in Figma, and my team is working with a product designer to add screenshots throughout the content guidelines to give clear examples for reference.
Showing specific, real world examples of content design patterns
We are also adding our component copy guidelines, such as how to style a CTA, into the description within the Figma components themselves. Whenever a component is copied into a project, the description goes with it, providing an easily accessible and simple way for anyone working on the screen to reference relevant and specific guidelines.
This is still a work in progress, but the product and engineering orgs are excited for these updated guidelines, and I am passionate about the possibilities these hold for our business and our customer.