Style and tone guidelines
2020-2021
There were dozens of style guides across the organization and several conflicting principles. Research showed that customers felt like they were working with different companies when they moved between businesses and products. We lacked agreement on things like sentence vs title case, tone, use of certain terminology and jargon, and most importantly, who owned the decisions on style.
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A single set of style and tone guidelines will help the enterprise present consistency in tone and language across all businesses making the user experience more cohesive and less stressful.
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Content strategy co-lead. Analysed all style guides across the organization for similarities and differences. Combined some other existing standards related to error messages, structured content, and conversational design into the single set of new standards. Shared the new guidelines across businesses and negotiated their adoption. Created a website to house the standards and did roadshows across the enterprise for training and awareness.
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Persuading other businesses that this new single source of truth was good for our customers and good for our internal content teams. Many were attached to the ones that they created.
Also, finding all the variations that small teams had created across the org was a challenge.
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Found and analyzed over a dozen style guides. Worked with stakeholders to agree on some of the finer points of the guidelines and incorporate some new guidelines around gender and inclusivity. Got executive support to call these the canonical standards and trained teams across the org on where they were housed and how to use them.
We were able to get the support of the businesses to use the new standards. Having the standards also resulted in having a means to train non-writers. Not all teams had content on it so having these guidelines allowed businesses to to at least have a reference guide for writing when creating their own content.