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When we starting doing audits for our design system, it quickly became clear that our copy needed one badly. Three years of different people writing different things had resulted in too many voices to count.
We wanted to both clean house and give our designers, engineers, product, and community teams a toolkit with which to write clear, concise, consistent copy. So we made a content persona.
MY ROLE
Workshop moderation, UX writing
PROJECT SQUAD
Research lead (me), research associate, branding workshop participants
METHODS
Audit, branding workshop, collages, continuums, persona creation
To kick things off we held a small workshop with team members from engineering, design, product, and community. They created mood boards, plotted dots on continuums, and wrote copy examples for scenarios like failed photo uploads or system crashes. The workshop left us with a sense of voice and tone, and also created investment in the content persona by those who would need to rely on it the most.
We decided that creating a persona out of these traits would make them easier to recall, and so Corrie was born. She gives a face to set of do’s and don’ts, and enables us to check any potential copy by asking, “What would Corrie say?”
RESULTS
Once we had Corrie, we put her to work. First we rewrote and released all of the copy found during our audit in her tone. Then we created some guidelines to live within the system for easy reference. When the team writes copy, they refer to Corrie instead of sending it to me to proofread. This helps us get helper text, error messaging, newsletters, emails, and any other copy written and published more quickly.