CASE STUDY
ubank Copy Style Guide
Created copy style guide to capture the new ubank's TOV and content guidelines, as well as promote awareness of content design. Using our document as a source of truth, any ubank employee would be able to create content that aligned with the brand.
Problem
Before my coworker and I joined the company, ubank had never had in-house copywriters. Content was written primarily by external agencies as well as the brand team.
With no designated team looking after written content, there was little consistency across channels, in terms of both tone of voice (TOV) and content structure.
Moreover, there were no existing processes for engaging copywriters when relevant work arose.
Approach
01. Ideating and aligning with brand
We started brainstorming the structure of the document and decided on the two high level categories: our tone of voice and writing guidelines.
To capture the tone of voice, we set up a meeting with the brand team in which we jotted down the central points of our brand identity. We then landed on five central writing principles that all copy should be based upon:
• Words of empowerment
• Short and sweet
• Let's move forward together
• Money positivity
• Little habits. Little wins.
The writing principles in the copy style guide
We chose to base the majority of our writing guidelines on the Australian government digital style manual, mainly because it was comprehensive, regularly updated, and also tailored for Australian English. Moreover, the manual championed accessible content design which worked well for our diverse customer base.
While the government style manual was a strong starting point, we also knew there would be instances where our own guidelines would differ. We again checked in with the brand team to see if they had any existing content rules they’d adhered to previously and made sure they were integrated into our style guide.
02. Creating the style guide
To create our style guide, we reviewed existing work we’d done on both the 86 400 app and website to identify how content and the tone of voice had previously been created. We then referenced the Australian government style manual to come up with guidelines that aligned with their recommendations as well as our previous work.
For example, the Australian government style manual recommended that headings should be short and concise, and not exceed 70 characters. We then expanded upon that in our style guide, advising amongst other things that headings be optimised for search engine ranking, written in sentence case and not end with full stops.
We also made sure to tailor our guidelines for different mediums, whether that be website, app, social media, blogs, etc. For example, the style guide outlined body copy within the app should ideally be either 1-2 lines, while website body copy could exceed 3 lines if necessary because of the differing purposes of each channel.
When introducing a particular writing convention, our style guide would firstly include a short description which was then accompanied by an example of that guideline in practice. To help readers, we’d also add in a “bad example” to avoid, which was usually based on incorrect copy we’d encountered when reviewing existing work.
If there were exceptions to a particular guideline, we’d also document this in the style guide.
Example writing convention
Once we had finished writing the first iteration of our copy style guide, we then took it through approvals with our marketing and compliance teams.
The copy style guide will never really be finished because we’ve intended it to act as a living document. Much like language, the content we write will change to suit new projects and regulations that arise in the future. This is why we built the copy style guide in Frontify, as the platform allows the document to be easily updated as well as disseminated.
03. Building awareness
Now we had created a copy style guide, we needed to create awareness of its existence so it could be used by anyone at ubank creating customer-facing content. We decided to present the style guide at our fortnightly Town Hall, attended by the entire company.
We recognised that a large part of our audience might not see the benefits of us creating a copy style guide, so we made sure to make the presentation less technical and more educational. As such, we didn’t go through the entire copy style guide but instead highlighted important sections that had relevance for our audience, such as the capitalisation of our brand name.
We discussed the importance of content guidelines in creating cross-channel consistency and ensuring accessibility in our work, and how that can directly benefit our customer base.
Presenting at the ubank Town Hall
Impact
Centralised resource to capture new brand guidelines and tone of voice
Increased visibility of content design as a craft
Alignment between content and brand teams at ubank