GoCanvas style guide development.

Content at GoCanvas was the wild, wild west. No one had paid consistent attention to it across all channels, from marketing to microcopy. Team members were creating their own documents as needed, not knowing that that documentation already existed. From a style standpoint, the same feature was referred to by 3 different labels depending on how long you’d been at the company. We needed consistency, we needed a voice… we needed a style guide. 

The style guide I developed was based on extensive time spent in the trenches with the Customer Support Team and the work I’d done preparing for the launch of the GoCanvas Community. Listening to our users and getting an understanding for how they thought about the product and their work directed me toward an approachable, empathetic tone. Furthermore, the research the Marketing Team did on an annual basis showed that our users loved the people they interacted with at GoCanvas, so I wanted to replicate the way our people really do speak and write. The language and style choices needed to be direct, simple, and helpful. 

The other guiding principle of the style guide was that it needed to empower our team to be writers. Everyone from the freshest BDR to our CEO needed to really be able to use it, so it had to be informative, helpful, and practical.