Blibli content guideline

Content design

Revamping Blibli content guidelines

The design team at Blibli is growing, and I noticed that the content guidelines needed updates. In this project, I led the initiative to revamp the tone, technical writing guidelines, and word list.

Timeline

2023 – 2024

My role

Project lead for a team of 11 writers

Key focus areas

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Tone

Providing enough guidance to help adjust our tone for diverse content needs.

Technical writing

Refining guidelines for grammar, punctuation, style, and formatting in content design.

Word list

Updating the glossary for terms used in Blibli products.

Tone analysis

The initial guidelines focused solely on four content types, failing to cover the diverse content we encounter daily.

We noticed a gap in our tone guidelines, especially for onboarding, warning messages, and distinguishing between empty states for task completion versus no results.

Process

Workshop. Vote. Define.

We began with a workshop to select the tones that best represent the Blibli brand, followed by a voting session for alignment. Once chosen, we analysed the most popular tones by filling in a diagram outlining user feelings, appropriate actions, and usage contexts.

Result

The result was a spectrum of tones, perfectly aligned with users' emotions, creating a more tailored, user-centric experience.

Tone implementation

Making everything crystal clear, from onboarding to error messages, right down to titles and buttons.

‍All guidelines are documented in the BLUE design system

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Technical guidelines analysis

Our old guidelines, limited to 17 technical writing points, couldn't address the variety of situations our growing team faced, leading to inconsistencies.

They lacked detailed instructions, clarity, and design style, making them too writer-focused and disconnected from other stakeholders.

Retro session

Know, Wonder, and Solution model

I held a retro session to facilitate a comprehensive understanding among the 11 writers. The session aimed to understand each writer's existing knowledge on specific topics, explore their questions, and prompt them to consider potential improvements and solutions.

Updated guidelines

Combining best practices with the team's content writing needs, the guidelines were expanded from 17 to 31 points and now organised into 5 chapters.

These new guidelines offer comprehensive instructions and incorporate a design style, all documented in the BLUE design system

Content implementation using the style guide

Working with designers, we identified the optimal font styling, integrated into the guideline as specified by Blibli design system.

One example of the implementation

Word list analysis

The old word list, with fewer than 200 entries, lacked context, example sentences, and proper noun capitalisation.

Despite the team's growth, it was never updated, leading to confusion and minimal usage, highlighting the need for a thorough overhaul.

The refined word list

4 writers tackled 1,200 word entries, resulting in 840 refined terms.

Teaming up with three other writers, we took charge of managing the word list, gathering over 1,200 entries and refining it to include over 840 terms with proper capitalisation, familiar abbreviations, context, distinctions between similar terms, sentence examples, and squad name tags.

Testimonials

This updated word list is invaluable for writers, aiding strategic writing and supporting UX researchers in designing surveys and reports. It's also a crucial resource for new team members to familiarise themselves with Blibli's internal terminology, addressing previous challenges they faced.