Toast is restaurant point-of-sale and management platform. I was hired to build UX writing as a discipline for the team. In my short time with the company, before we were impacted by layoffs as a result of COVID-19, I contributed voice and tone standards, writing best practices, and UX writing across the Toast platform.

PROJECT TYPE - UX WRITING AND CONTENT STRATEGY
MY ROLE - UX WRITING LEAD
MY CONTRIBUTIONS - UX DESIGN, UX WRITING, CONTENT STRATEGY

The challenge

The lack of writing standards was allowing for inconsistency across the portfolio and making it difficult for designers to make decisions about things like terminology, capitalization, voice, and tone. It was also making it difficult for writers across marketing, customer education, and tech docs to write with a consistent style across the end-to-end customer journey.

The solution

I worked across teams to create voice and writing standards for the Toast Design System. I also created the first cross-functional writing guild for Toast where writers across the entire company from marketing to education met monthly to discuss style issues and build relationships across team silos. We were in the process of building out a space in Confluence to act as the single source of truth for everyone writing for Toast.

The process

📚 CONTENT AUDIT AND TEAM INTERVIEWS

I started by getting an understanding of existing writing standards we had across product, brand, and marketing. I also met with leaders across teams to understand how writers were working together and whether they were using existing standards. These conversations helped me to identify communication breakdowns between teams and other potential gaps to be filled.

📊 USER RESEARCH WITH DESIGN AND PRODUCT TEAMS

After I had a general understanding of our writing standards and content ecosystem, I worked with product teams to identify the key pain points they were experiencing as a result of our existing standards (or lack thereof). I catalogued those pain points along with common writing questions and used that information to craft the first version of our writing standards.

Pain points

Existing grammar and style guidelines are geared to marketing/brand
No existing standards at all for customer education or product
No way to document or socialize writing standards or even come to consensus on style decisions

Common questions

What component or design pattern do I use to provide embedded help?
What terminology should I use for [x]?
How formal or informal should I be here?
How do I write for this component (ie, button, confirmation message, walkthrough)

What I contributed

🗣 VOICE STANDARDS

I worked closely with our brand team to help define overarching guidance on the Toast voice.

✍️ TONE SPECTRUM

✍️ UI WRITING STANDARDS

✍️ UX WRITING SAMPLES

Once we had our first version of our voice, tone, and writing standards, I contributed writing guidance at the UI component and design pattern level to help designers understand how to apply the Toast voice to microcopy for things like buttons, labels, errors, and empty states.

Example - Toast offline mode

When Toast loses connectivity, it has a huge impact on restaurants the their staff. The goal with this project was to help customers understand why their devices lost connectivity and what steps they might be able to take to fix it quickly.

This example illustrates the way I provided feedback to our design lead, and my recommendations for ways we could organize the content differently to make it easier for users to scan and consume the content quickly.

Before

After

Example - Create a new password

This project revisited design and copy for our login screens. This example displays copy recommendations I made to our design lead that make it easier for users to scan from header to button label. It also includes a design suggestion that works to make the password restrictions easier to read.

Before

After

Example - Error messages

This is another example from the revisited design and copy for our login screens. In this example, I recommended new copy for an inline error message that helps the user understand what the problem is and provides a quick and easy way for them to solve it.

Before

After

Example - Email

This is the email users receive when they ask to reset their password. We wanted to keep the call-to-action clear and visually distinct, but provide more of the Toast voice that makes our users feel like we're right there with them and we genuinely care.

We also removed the Toast URL from the original email, which felt random, competed with the primary CTA, and didn't give users any real idea of where it might take them if they did decide to click on it.

Before

After

✍️ UX WRITING GROWTH STRATEGY

Finally, I worked with the Associate Director of UX to create this maturity model for our UX team. It helped us get clarity around our vision for the UX Writing team at Toast, and helped guide the activities we needed to take quarter-by-quarter to get us from one stage of growth to the next.

The challenge

The solution

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