UX Writing Guidelines
Style Guide, Documentation, Design System
Summary
Throughout 2023, I worked with Loyal’s design director, design system designer, and other product designers to develop a foundational set of UX writing guidelines and best practices for the design team to begin using, testing, and incorporating into Loyal’s design system, Uniform.
Client
My role
Primary designer (style guide, Wiki framework, facilitator, presenter)
Team
Design system designer, design director
Timeline
January 2023 – June 2023
Introduction
Writing for healthcare is complex
Above all, it requires awareness, sensitivity, and empathy. The importance of getting it right is high considering who these products impact. While developing these guidelines, I examined some of the broader implications of writing for healthcare workers, patients, and the designers responsible for these projects.
Problem
Addressing a lack of content strategy
As Loyal began unifying its suite of products under a single platform, Loyal’s design system, Uniform, continued to expand and mature. However, there was no parallel strategy in place to address content.
What could we do that would help designers begin incorporating UX writing best practices into their day-to-day design processes?Goals
Identifying guiding principles
We wanted to anticipate the needs of individual designers while addressing broader organizational questions.
⚡️ Empower
Encourage designers to write confidently and effectively for a variety of different solutions.
🔄 Iterate
Provide ongoing feedback on what is and isn’t working and what additional needs exist.
💬 Inform
Demonstrate the value of UX writing to Loyal’s design team, leadership, and company.
🔗 Unify
Adopt a unified writing practice by encouraging designers to incorporate it into their processes.
Process
Establishing a baseline
We started with a simple set of tactical style guidelines and then continued to iterate on them.
Grammar and mechanics—I started by outlining guidelines around grammar and mechanics. These could be immediately implemented across all of Loyal’s products without previous UX writing experience.
Style guide
Creating style guidelines
I set up a reference document outlining basic formatting needs for my solution at Loyal. I then slowly incorporated other examples I came across in other products.
✨ Formatting and styling
Dates
Numbers
Capitalization
Buttons
Modals
Other microcopy
UX writing presentation—I presented at one of our weekly design meetings and shared the slide deck with the team.
Presentations
Sharing UX as a practice
I gave a presentation on UX writing to our team of 10+ designers. I provide a high-level overview of the initiative and its goals. We addressed concerns and ways designers could begin incorporating writing best practices into their existing processes.
📊 Presentation topics
UX writing
Voice and tone
Writing best practices
Current challenges
Future goals
Ways to contribute
UX writing survey—We sent a Google Forms survey to gauge the team’s familiarity with UX writing and identify areas where designers needed support.
Surveys
Gathering designer feedback
After the presentation, we sent an informal survey to designers to better understand their writing needs and to gauge their interest in contributing to the style guide.
📝 Survey topics
Common content types
Familiarity with UX writing
Confidence in UX writing
Future writing topics
Interest in contributing
Content guidelines in ClickUp—We eventually created a formalized set of content guidelines in ClickUp.
Guidelines
Building on a foundation
I continued developing the style guidelines, using Microsoft and MailChimp as guides. I also consolidated the information (previously in Google Docs) to ClickUp for greater visibility and easier collaboration.
✏️ Content guideline sections
Vision and mission
Content design principles
Voice and tone
Conversational writing
Branding and marketing
Writing best practices
Grammar and mechanics
Roadmap
Outlining a maturity framework
We continued to mature and expand UX writing across Loyal. The design system designer, design director, and I outlined a maturity-level framework (as part of the larger design system roadmap). We detailed what criteria we might expect it to meet and how we planned to share it beyond the design team.
🌱 Seed*
General guiding principles
Guidelines for prioritized use cases
* We were at this stage.
🌿 Sapling
Guidelines for all use cases
More robust documentation
🌳 Tree
Voice and tone guidelines
Comprehensive documentation
🌳🌳 Forest
Cohesive content strategy
Detailed use case guidelines
Additional writing
Spurring other writing initiatives at Loyal
Outside of the style guidelines, we began several other writing projects.
🌎 Product Wikis
When I arrived at Loyal, product documentation existed mainly in Figma files and technical specifications on Google Docs. I created a Wiki consolidating all of this information and then circulated it within our team. Our goals were to:
Serve as a single source of truth
Reduce the effort of tracking down information
Educate and onboard future team members
The format was so successful that other designers eventually adapted it to their own products.
📝 Surveys
Survey review
I helped several other designers draft and revise surveys they had developed for different research initiatives.
Speaker series
I also collaborated with Loyal’s design director to kick off a design speaker series. Our first guest was survey expert Caroline Jarrett, who gave a company-wide presentation on healthcare surveys.