Creating a Content Guide
ProblemS
Content within different applications have a noticeably different voice and tone.
Too few content strategists to support all of the applications.
Too much time spent explaining or arguing what is correct.
Solution
Create a new content guide, primarily for our team’s use, but with the long-term goal of it being adopted by any other content-producing team within the organization.
Process
Overview
Audit any existing guidelines.
Analyze other companies’ content/style guides.
Create the structural hierarchy of our new content guide.
Solidify content guide logistics (hosting, storage, format, etc.).
Review the different styles and voices within our applications.
Create a list of all topics we’d like within our guide.
Work through each topic to determine what would be best for our team and organization.
Add all topics to our guide.
Celebrate ( ^o^) !
Evangelize our guide within our department and eventually to other departments.
Deep Dive
Once I cataloged the problems our team faced, did my research, and attended some lectures, I realized a content guide would help solve a lot of the common issues we faced and give our team more leverage when making content recommendations.
After getting approval from my superiors, I began by auditing what guidelines we had. I then realized there was no point in reinventing the wheel when many other industry-leading software companies have public-facing style guides. I reviewed numerous guides and compared their structures and entries. I listed out the most common entries amongst them, forming the foundation for ours.
While the pre-work for this project was underway, I began meeting with our Design System team to host our guide within their system site. This would allow us to get an initial version out faster and garner more exposure, as they already had the infrastructure in place and had already been widely adopted within our organization. Additionally, many of the style guides from leading companies like Adobe, IBM, Google, and more, hosted their style guides within their larger design system sites.
After having the structure mostly complete, my team and I began meeting 2 times a week to discuss the topics. We took into account what other competitors did, what other industry leaders did, and what our company predominantly did. Slowly, we filled up our guide, divvying up adding the topics into the guide.
As we neared completion of our MVP, we began to evangelize it within our department so the designers would know why we were recommending certain changes. After officially going live, we informed other departments about our guide.
Our content guide has been extremely successful. It has given many of our products a consistent voice and tone. We have gone back and audited many of our applications and brought them in line with our new guide.
Additionally, it has made content reviews much easier by being able to reference our guide as the reason for our changes.
Most designers and product managers now reference our guide and send it to their colleagues.
It has also helped many other content-producing groups have a structured, consistent voice and tone, as they have adopted our guide.