I establish repeatable patterns for aligned and efficient teams.

Project: Content standards & style guide

• Role: Content Designer / UX Writer
• Timeline: Ongoing
• Tools: Miro, Figma, Jira, Confluence
• Outcome: Product Terms Bank, Glossary, Content Style Guide,

🛠 The Problem

We are building a platform for various enterprise software solutions. When I started, these applications were lacking basic content design and UX writing principles. For example, they lacked a defined product terms, external/internal content style guide, and complete glossaries. As a result, there were many inconsistencies, inappropriate usage of terminology, and broken text patterns.

✍️ My Approach

First get immersed in the industry, to start to understand users and common terminology. Review the applications to understand their current state. Then start to:

• Make revisions to product terminology
• Designate an external content style guide
• Create an internal style guide
• Collaborate with the Design team to introduce and uphold text patterns

Step 1: Establish preferred terms

✍️ Approach

Starting with a terms bank, I recorded all of the existing terms. Then I researched competitors and the industry itself to find commonly used terms. This was done in order to compare industry terms to our own and collaborate with the product teams to then determine what preferred terms would be. Preferred terms were then added to the glossary and updated in the application.

🏅 Outcome

Step 2: Designate an external style guide

✍️ Approach

Before creating an internal style guide, I started by searching out an external guide that we could adopt. The reasoning behind this is that an external guide helps to keep you at the forefront of industry standards, while saving content designer time and resources. So I researched and evaluated 4 well known style guides, Mailchimp, Microsoft, Material Design Writing, and GOV.UK. Based on various criteria, the Mailchimp Content Style Guide was selected as our external guide.

Step 3: Establish an internal style guide

✍️ Approach

Content style guide

Step 4: Add Concepts and Text Patterns to Style Guide

✍️ Approach

Many elements have been added to the style guide as the product continues to evolve. This is an example of one of those recent additions. It is a concept for the platform’s alerts. It demonstrates a collaboration with a product designer for the components and the text patterns that I have prescribed for each foreseeable context.

Project: Component design

• Role: Content Designer
• Timeline: 2 week sprint
• Tools: Figma, ADO
• Outcome: Component and documentation

🛠 The Problem

We needed a component for a selection where the user could choose between various options with more than one comparable element. There was work done on this component by a UX/UI designer and accessibility specialists, but it lacked the content design perspective.

✍️ Approach

1. Revise documentation to align with other components in the design system.
2. Assess the purpose of this particular component especially in comparison with other similar components.
3. Craft placeholder copy for the component that guides future users on what kind of content to include.