Results
20%
Productivity boost
across writers and reviewers
15%
Usability improvement
across features
The situation
A team depended on tribal knowledge
I was new among a group of UX and documentation writers assigned to product teams. The existing style guide didn’t specifically cover UX writing — the day-to-day decisions about UI elements that writers were making feature by feature.
For example, multiple decisions go into writing the label for a button: Use a noun or a verb? Use title case or cap only the first word? Any of these choices can work, as long as they’re consistent across product features.
In our case, the only way to make a new label consistent with the existing UI was to explore the product yourself — and if you found an inconsistency (for example one feature with a “Save” button and another with “OK”), you’d post and wait for other writers to weigh in. This routine was time consuming and unreliable, and it pulled time away from strategic thinking and research.
the challenge
Product growth lent urgency to scalable UX writing
I knew that with each release, problems with the UX content could be baked into a product for a long time to come. Each baked-in problem could make the product a little harder to use and require team workarounds that would drag down productivity. Even minor problems took away from the product’s overall polish and usability.
I wanted to avoid UX content compromises in products I would write for in the future. I also wanted to make my own job easier by eliminating the bottleneck of a tribal-knowledge-based process.
My approach
1. I borrowed the standards model from publishing
Newspapers, magazines, and book publishers are low-margin industries. One way they’ve managed costs is by using a house style guide to document and propagate decisions about spelling variations, word choice, and so on.
I adapted that model for UI text.
2. I started with the highest-impact standards
Poor UX content adds to backlogs, drives customer support costs, and slows adoption. To have the most impact on those metrics, I started with standards for the most common UI elements, including buttons, links, and field labels.
“As a team reviewer, I’ve found Cate’s guidelines have been key to the UI text team’s success. Her breadth of knowledge of UI text and the design system have been invaluable.”
Lead Content Designer, Fortune 500 Company
3. The standards shaped key attributes of the product
Voice and tone
Each entry in the standards included specific, objective parameters that helped to express the voice and tone of the company’s product across features, as well as consistency and usability.
- A definition of the design element
- Capitalization and punctuation rules
- Whether to write a noun phrase or verb phrase
- Length guidelines
- Relevant grammar notes
Future-proofing
When writing each standard, I surveyed the product to make sure that the standard would work with longer or shorter character counts, different contexts, etc. Editors have long done this kind of research to help designers make optimal design choices.
Related references
I added a landing page with links to related references. Some logical companion references to any company’s UI text standards are a style guide for general house style, schema naming standards, and code-commenting and internationalization practices.
“Cate influenced far beyond her immediate team, mentoring junior writers and establishing best practices that were adopted across the broader organization. Cate set a very high bar.”
Product Leader, Fortune 500 Company
4. I expanded and maintained the system
Receiving enthusiastic feedback from other writers that the new standards simplified their workflow, I expanded them, working with designers and other writers to understand each element’s requirements.
I prioritized simplicity for writers as much as for end users, knowing that simpler standards would not only benefit customers but minimize cognitive load on writers. If existing content showed a trend, I usually went with that path of least resistance, while incorporating industry best practices for content usability that would maintain clarity and consistency across the app.