Overview
─────
Establishing New Content Standards for a Consumer App With 10M+ Users
01
Challenge
This app has helped over 10 million people print cherished memories, while maintaining impressive customer satisfaction scores. As the company scaled, the app’s content, historically owned by Product Managers, needed an external audit to identify gaps, redundancies, and opportunities before establishing new content standards.
The company planned to hire a full-time content designer. A complete content audit would enable the new hire to hit the ground running and quickly score their first wins in minimizing friction points.
02
Discovery
I interviewed stakeholders to understand business goals, then conducted a comprehensive content audit across the iOS app’s critical user flows: onboarding, photo uploading, editor, and checkout. I analyzed tone of voice (ToV), writing style, content hierarchy, and information architecture.
During discovery, I also facilitated tone of voice exercises. We examined 5 examples of product copy: confirmation messages, permissions, photo book descriptions, up-sells, and forbidden actions. Team members placed each on the ToV spectrum: Formal vs Casual, Serious vs Funny, Respectful vs Irreverent, and Matter-of-fact vs Enthusiastic.
The goal was to align the team on voice and writing principles, demonstrate variations in consistency and clarity across UI copy, and provide a framework for creating effective, context-driven product copy.
03
Approach
- Audited the current app structure and content organization to identify gaps, redundancies, and opportunities for improvement
- Created a shared understanding of the product’s content clarity, usefulness, and consistency
- Created the implementation roadmap to serve as a foundational plan for the upcoming content design hire
- Using a product experience example, I completed the content design process for a new feature, which involved the following steps:
- Developing relevant questions
- Establishing guidelines
- Formulating hypotheses
- Identifying benefits
- Assessing potential revenue impact
- Developing relevant interview questions
- Performing analysis
- Creating example UI copy implementations
- Creating content testing plan
04
Impact
| Team alignment | Unified understanding of content design as distinct from copywriting |
| Improving clarity through content design | Identifying inconsistencies, unclear messaging, misalignment with user intent, and variations in button labels, tone, and information hierarchy to reduce friction and boost conversions |
| Foundation for growth | Audit serves as playbook for new hire and cross-functional collaboration |
| Revenue opportunity | Identified potential 5% monthly revenue increase through improved pricing presentation |
05
Client feedback
Daniel Slowacek
Experience Design and Customer Insights Lead
“The tone of voice exercise was very effective at showing current inconsistencies and aligning a group of people as well as educating them. Your level of organization, communication, and preparations were brilliant.
As three benefits of purchasing this service, I’d list:
– Having a tangible list of issues related to content/information that we can review and prioritize
– Demonstrating how content design works and how it could work for us (also with the process, ways of working, calling out things that go beyond OG copywriting duties)
– For me, it also informed my hiring of the content design role (what to look for, how to justify a higher pay than OG copywriting, etc.)
I would for sure recommend this service. You are a pleasure to work with and I definitely got what I was looking for, and then some more. I particularly enjoyed you being onsite and showing that you’re not just some random external consultant but someone who tries to get a lot of context even before the audit.”