UX Writing

Defining UX writing guidelines

Making the Pantheon experience more consistent and trustworthy

Deliverables
  • Internal writing guidelines for in-product
  • In-app messaging strategy
Summary
  • Type: UX Writing
  • Timeline: Jan-March 2022
  • My role: Project lead and UX writer

The problem

Pantheon designers and engineers needed a shared source of truth for UI copy and in-product messaging. Without this asset, the team risked inconsistencies and misspellings, which hurt the company’s credibility. Work was delayed whenever a team member needed to track down an answer about grammar or formatting.

The solution

Create a set of content guidelines to make language, style, vocabulary, tone, and voice more consistent throughout our product.

Research comes first

Every good project starts with research. Before defining Pantheon’s content guidelines, I did the following:

Competitive analysis

How are other technology companies solving this problem?

Audit

What type of content exists in the product today? What will we need in the future? What types of limitations or restrictions do we need to work around (ex: space, layout, character limits).

Interviews

I spoke with team members in Product, Marketing, and Documentation.

Existing insights

What do we already know? In this case, our brand and corporate communication team had already complied some useful information about our audience, which was used to define brand voice and tone.

Defining voice and tone

Pantheon’s brand team had recently completed an exercise to define brand personality and voice. We use the Pantheon brand voice across all channels—marketing, customer communications, sales presentations, in-product messaging, etc.

I think of the brand like a person. A person has the same voice all of the time, but their tone changes depending on the situation.

Similarly, we must adjust tone to account for specific use cases and match where our audience is at in their journey. This mean defining a specific voice and tone for product content.

Product tone

When including words within the product, we strive to be accurate, brief, clear, and helpful. We also use active voice.

Defining styles

After defining voice and tone, I needed to shift gears and focus on creating Pantheon’s in-house writing rules. These rules standardize usage and formatting for the words within our product.

The in-house rules are based on our product user needs. For ex: We do not include periods when writing a time (9 am) because we often have space limitations within the product UI, and the periods are not necessary for comprehension.

For writing questions that are not covered by our in-house rules, we default to using what is recommended by the Chicago Manual of Style. We chose Chicago style because it is extremely detailed and well-suited for technical writing.

Sharing early and often

It was important to share work progress early and often, in order to get valuable feedback from other teams. I brought early drafts of the guidelines to design critiques and squad stand-ups. This not only facilitated fast iteration, but also helped to familiarize other teams with the guidelines before they rolled out. This helped later with adoption and buy-in.

Implementation

For the rollout, I worked with the design systems team to communicate to all of the engineering squads via Slack channels and stand-ups. We did an audit of the product to find things that needed to be changed. We leveraged a company All Hands meeting to inform other departments, and we included it in an internal newsletter.

Key learning

When presenting a guideline or rule, it is helpful to explain the guideline AND provide examples. 

Examples in the writing guidelines

Impact

I created the equivalent of 30+ printed pages of writing guidelines, spanning product tone of voice and in-house rules for style, grammar, and vocabulary.

The product content guidelines are now part of Pantheon’s design system.

This effort resulted in a more consistent experience in the product, reduced spelling and formatting errors, and enabled product teams to move faster.


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