Client

JobPay - UI screens

Personal project

Scope

Voice and tone, content standards & systems, systems thinking & design accessibility

My Role

UX Writer / Content Designer responsible for:

  • Defining voice & tone

  • Establishing UX content principles

  • Setting terminology standards

‍Problem

Onboarding flows were mapped out, but copy had inconsistent voice, confusing terminology and poor content hierarchy. The ‘design team’ flagged that the experience was confusing, and I needed to get the product user-ready without redesigning the flows.

Solution

Create a new style guide with UX principles for the JobPay app

Apply the style guide to the flows in preparation for a design review with the Head of UX and VP of Product, ensuring consistency in UX Writng, Clear transactions that reduce cognitive load, a voice that builds trust with both user types.

Constraints

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Process

Start with the style guide, not the screens

I started writing the Style Guide to set guardrails for the tone, voice, and UX principles. I could then make UX decisions consistently and intentionally.


I started with the content principles to ensure content was easy to navigate. ‘Prioritising key information’ for example, would ensure information hierarchy is clear in the UI.

Set voice characteristics and preferred terms & word choice

Using the Nielsen Norman Group’s (NN/g)  framework of 4 core dimensions of tone of voice, I set the voice and characteristics for JobPay. This would give us a consistent voice across the experience, build user trust and allow us to resonate emotionally with users in different contexts. 

Next, I chose our preferred terms to ensure terminology is consistent and easy-to-understand throughout:

Setting the rules for Tone

While the core "voice" remained consistent, I wanted us to adapt our tone depending on the touchpoint. This would create an intuitive experience that considered the user’s emotional state at specific moments in the journey.

I then set the style rules for headings, body copy, forms, currency, and numbers

Challenge

I’d first decided we’d use ordinals in dates for clarity, but I tested this in the UI and realised that didn’t work in mobile due to space limitations. To keep formatting consistent, I had to change the rule itself. This is important to consider when writing future style guides - to allow room for allowances for different interfaces.

Challenge

Some currencies share the same symbols eg $ (AUD) and $ (USD) and we would need to differentiate between them to avoid confusion. In this case, I’ve recommended testing solutions with design teams, such as displaying the currency and the symbol in the UI for absolute clarity.

Learning

When defining brand, if this was a real life scenario I would have consulted with other stakeholders to define who we are at our core. Defining a brand is usually a shared effort. Carrying out interviews, I would have asked:

  • If our company had a personality, what would it be in 3 words?

  • If we had an aesthetic, what would it look like?

  • I want our company/products to make people feel (adjective)

  • I want people to (verb) when they interact with our products

  • We don’t like companies that sound (adjective)

  • We’d like to mimic the voice of (person/brand)

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