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Context
This was a company building enterprise solution for product data and supply chain management.
My most impactful contribution: creating and socializing a glossary as well as content guidelines and text patterns.
Problem
The product lacked 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 that caused friction for users and added more cognitive load to an already complex solution.
Goals
Users: Feel confident using the product
Business: Reduce barriers to switching from other tools to our software by decreasing cognitive load and increasing user confidence.
My approach
First get immersed in the industry to understand users and common terminology. Review the applications to understand their current state. Then:
- 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.
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.
✍️ Approach
- Revise documentation to align with other components in the design system.
- Assess the purpose of this particular component especially in comparison with other similar components.
- Craft placeholder copy for the component that guides future users on what kind of content to include.
