The problem

My experience creating and owning the style guide and brand voice for Ancestry’s health product was one of the main reasons Google wanted me to lead UX writing for their TV platform. As at Ancestry, this young product lacked a consistent voice and vocabulary. This would complicate and slow things as engineers and PMs tried to track down existing language for new screens and features — and would confuse users when, inevitably, different terms were used to describe the same functions.

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The solution: bring someone (me) on board to oversee all the language in the product. This would mean creating and owning the product style guide and communicating those language and messaging decisions to the team and company as a whole

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The process

In my first couple weeks, I audited as much of the product as I could, scanning for inconsistencies in language that might be problematic for users or the team. I found, for instance, that TV shows were sometimes referred to as “shows,” sometimes “TV shows,” sometimes “TV” and sometimes “series.”

 

With this done, I had a list of the first decisions that needed to be made.

 

I then audited competitors’ products, reviewed our existing user research and looked around for any insights around how the ways we talk about TV today are changing, and how that language varies by place. For instance, I found that TV dramas are usually called “series” in Europe, while “shows” typically refers only to reality TV or sitcoms. And I found discussions on how many shows today, particularly those made by streaming networks, blur the definitional lines between what we’d once call a movie, a TV show or a miniseries.

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Perhaps most importantly, I reviewed any relevant existing Google style guides I could find, such as those for YouTube, YouTube TV, the Android Play store and Google’s overall UX and style guidance documentation. Google TV is a unique product with specific types of users and functionality, but it’s voice and terminology still has to feel “Google-y” and to mesh with, for instance, the other pre-installed Google apps on an Android device.

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Based on all this, I drafted recommendations for a product vocabulary, as well as guidance on our brand voice and tone.

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I shared out these initial recommendations with the product owners, tweaked a couple recommendations based on their feedback, and then concretized these recommendations as final decisions in our new product style guide.

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