Problem

I joined an Enterprise team as the sole content designer and was instructed to follow the company-wide product style guide designed for residential and SMB products. However, as I engaged with the enterprise client portal, I realized the style guide was inadequate for technically savvy IT professionals. Additionally, I learned the enterprise marketing team had its own distinct style guide, creating significant misalignment in enterprise content creation.

Project

I was tasked with leading the creation of an enterprise style guide that considered our users and bridged the gap between enterprise marketing and enterprise product design.

Before digging in

For the record, it’s hard to jump right into where I started and pretend I jumped into action, as a lot of time was spent pondering how to approach this massive, high-visibility, major-impacting project as a busy solo content designer. I have created style guides and editorial guidelines in the past, but this was different - there were already style guides being used, and it was my job to find discrepancies so we could align and have proper guidance for all future designs. An incredible percentage of this project was in the weeds, researching, gathering and documenting until I had enough knowledge (and courage) to put pen to paper.

Voice analysis

I started analyzing voice and tone guidelines from the original product style guide and enterprise marketing style guide. Seeing the residential / SMB voice and tone guidelines next to enterprise marketing voice and tone was very eye-opening. It was clear this was the part that needed solidifying before I could move forward.

Workshop

I conducted an interactive workshop in Lucid for the design team, where we delved into the voice and tone guidelines from both style guides. We reminded ourselves about the average enterprise user, using personas created by our research team as reference points. Recognizing the diverse nature of our users—ranging from billing professionals and IT experts to individuals with minimal IT experience—we identified that certain residential / SMB voice qualities might not resonate with enterprise users. We eliminated irrelevant residential / SMB voice characteristics, emphasized key enterprise voice qualities, and discussed alternative approaches for various scenarios, including success and failure modals.

Documentation

I documented all entries from the residential/SMB style guide on sticky notes on a Lucid board. Unlike a traditional alphabetical style guide, it focuses more on the approach to designs, covering aspects like formatting headers, CTAs in roadblock modals and the acceptance of legal terms. I then broke down the information into granular entries, aiming for a more layout more similar to an AP style guide in the end. I did the same with the enterprise marketing style guide.

This high-level side-by-side view revealed areas where the guides aligned and many areas where they did not, for example, capitalization. Marketing uses sentence case in all enterprise efforts, including .com website. Residential / SMB follows title case for all efforts, including their .com website. That means our enterprise clients see sentence case on .com and title case in our client portal.

Research

I researched public-facing corporate style guides, drawing inspiration from companies like Intuit, Mailchimp, Google, Yahoo, and others. This helped me identify areas where we could take a design-centric approach rather than a system or developer-oriented one. This deep dive into other style guides was such a reminder of the vastness of content design. I found it refreshing to see how others documented their guidance, and examples they gave correct and incorrect versions for visual guidance. This research and documentation stage was the brain boost, providing the foundation I needed to build the new style guide.

Design team review

My lucid board was a full sticky note masterpiece! I engaged my product design peers and director again to do a walkthrough of possibilities. The importance of content design decisions was evident, and we had a great discussion about the benefits of having a new guide in place.

Setting standards

After selecting how we’d approach most style guide entries, I created an alphabetical list of guidelines on our internal-facing website. The benefit of this is that each entry would have its own URL to share among the team, or in Figma if there was a specific area that stakeholder feedback didn’t align.

Cross-functional collaboration

Leadership: My director and I met with our VP to do a walkthrough and get feedback. She pointed out ways this could be infused throughout the organization and gave direction on which stakeholders would need to give input before calling it complete.

Product: Product managers and product owners were happy to see guidance and documentation, and they were unaware of the previous guidelines. The product managers concentrated on alignment in designs, while the product owners concentrated on how it would benefit the dev team. I made plans to meet with the dev team after all stakeholders gave feedback.

Client Engagement: I interacted with client engagement frequently, and asked for any documentation they used to align content. My goal was to analyze and see if we could align so the new style guide could be followed by their team, as well as product design. I learned they were loose in their documentation, but they were open to more connection to this new guide. They suggested a specific team member to review, and I iterated on a few entries after her feedback.

Marketing: Bridging product and marketing is always a goal for me, so I was happy to engage and iterate where appropriate with marketing. The marketing manager was first curious why we couldn’t just use the enterprise marketing style guidelines. We had a good conversation about UX writing vs. marketing copywriting. I explained that the marketing guide was incorporated into the new guide, but we needed more. We had tables and cards and actionable flows to consider. It was a great collaborative conversation. He engaged positively and gave feedback, and our connection was a big win. We didn’t align everywhere, but where we didn’t was very minor - for example, when to use punctuation at the end of list items.

Content Design: While I was the only content designer within enterprise, there were other content designers within the organization who work on residential / SMB product design teams. While I could have engaged them from the beginning, we did not ever work together, and their users were quite different from mine. I also didn’t want to create any internal issues on their teams if I asked them to help create new guidelines for enterprise. However, I did engage a content design director who encouraged me and offered feedback on the enterprise guidelines. This support was a critical piece of my confidence moving forward.

Outcome

Version one of an enterprise style guide that is aligned with our actual users, not residential / SMB users. While its main audience is product design, it’s a significant resource for all enterprise content-creating teams, including marketing and client engagement. It has become part of our design process in a much more concrete way. It is a living document, and new guidelines are documented as they arise. There is a greater connection between product and design teams in terms of content efforts, which was apparent during design bug documentation efforts.

Future efforts

The specific word guidance section will grow over time, with product, SME and marketing input.

This project reinforced

• Creating a style guide is a massive project that should be done as a team. Diversity in thought, experience and approach can take things deeper over one person’s thoughts, experience and approach. If you’re considering creating a style guide for your organization, create a content design team to tackle, not a single content designer.

• It’s important to analyze style guides when they don’t feel totally aligned with the user.

• Product + marketing relationships are important, especially when creating the best user experience. Build bridges and connect often.