Tone and voice guide creation. A case study on why these guides matter and my process for developing it.
Project overview
Context
Until I arrived at Radix, all products had been designed without established content principles. An informal system existed but nothing was written down or formalised.
When I arrived and did an audit of the Radix Wallet, I immediately saw basic mistakes: inconsistencies, spelling errors and overly-long walls of text.
One of my first recommendations was a tone, voice and style guide.
Why it matters
“Design in the absence of content is not design – it’s decoration.”
With the Radix Wallet, the team had built some incredible tech that looked good. But the content was designed by people who didn’t have the time to think through what a user needs to know to move easily through the app.
It was my job to take the time and think as a user thinks.
Who was involved
Deciding on a company’s house style is not a one-man job. Everyone has an opinion on what the company stands for. And others inside the organisation often have more insight into the users and what they want. So to help, I worked with:
Product Manager
Chief Product Officer
Head of Product Design
Chief Marketing Officer
Design Lead
The process
Research
Research consisted of three parts:
Analysed existing content.
Workshopped ideas with Radix colleagues.
Studied best practice across the tech industry.
Research took about 2-3 weeks to complete.
Strategy
My strategy for creating the guide was based on five pillars:
Educate – outline the purpose of the guide and explain what content design is.
Define – formalise how Radix will speak to users.
Identify – explain clearly who the Radix users are.
Alignment – decide content design principles that everyone at Radix would stick to.
Craft – style, punctuation, grammar, deixis, spelling, numbering, etc.
These five principles ended up fitting organically into two sections. 1, 2 and 3 comprised the first part. I grouped 4 and 5 together to make the second part.
Execution
The difficulty in creating a brand new tone, voice and style guide is finding the time in your day to finish it. For two weeks, I blocked out 90 minutes in my calendar (during the post-lunch lull) to plough through the work of putting words on the page.
A few times a week I had quick check-ins with the Head of Design to ask questions and ensure what I was doing was aligned with his vision of design at Radix.
When I finished the guide, I shared it with the CTO, product manager and Head of Design. It was crucial I got their buy-in at this stage so that I had the authority to embed my recommendations as quickly as possible.
Once I got sign-off, I was ready to start ironing out all the unnecessary capital letters and annoying inconsistencies that I’d noticed six weeks previously.
Outcome
The final guide
I titled the first iteration ‘Content design for Radix products’ and it contained the following sections:
Introduction – purpose of guide and content design.
Voice and Tone – what voice and tone are, who the users are and how to write for them.
Content design style guide – the mechanics of content design: layouts, spelling, numbering, etc.
This is a living document though, so the team and I are constantly updating it based on everyday practice. Soon, we’ll enlarge it to incorporate everything that Radix produces related to words: marketing, website, socials, whitepapers, technical guides and blog posts.
Impact
It’s difficult to measure the impact of a guide like this in numbers. So there are no stats to say it helped. Anecdotally though, I’ve spoken to engineers who have found it helpful to have a reference guide when they’re implementing designs and have a question about number formatting, or whether or not to use title case for button copy.
And I know from my own experience that it sped up the design process because the team no longer had distracting 10-minute discussions about the difference between “log in” and “login”. (One’s a verb; one’s a noun).
Ultimately, this piece of work will contribute to turning Radix’s amazing tech into great experiences that can deliver useful benefits for anyone.
