As a UX writing apprentice at TechFleet, I was hired by the team at The Melanin Village, a growth-centered gathering space that provides curriculum and community for Black and Brown homeschoolers.

Our stakeholder, Brenaea, was looking to migrate The Village to a new platform and create a mobile app. She wanted to maintain the original website were user can learn more about the community.

The UX writing team did platform research, conducted a content audit, and created a style guide which incorporated a glossary of terms that was already in use.

Content audit

Our team leads set us up to start Phase 1 with a content audit. We used Google Sheets to document all of the content in front of the paywall. We were given a login for the paid content but it never worked for anyone on our team so we stopped there.

I read a few articles and watched videos about content auditing and many resources suggested using a web crawler to get started. I suggested this at out weekly meeting and we looked further into that idea, but since there ended up being so few pages to audit, we decided it would be a good experience to comb through manually.

We divided the main navigation pages across our 6 person team and dove into the audit. My section ended up being a link straight to PayPal so I helped audit another section with multiple pages nested within.

We ended up with many ideas for improvements, as well as a better understanding of the existing voice and tone of the organization.

The UX design team also wrote up a heuristic evaluation and our teams collaborated in order to consolidate our audit documents into one cohesive design/writing audit.

The following image is a screenshot of the first part of our content audit and it links to the full spreadsheet on Google Sheets.

Style guide

When we finished our content audit, leads brought in some resources to help us familiarize ourselves with brand archetypes and how they can help us land on an appropriate voice and tone. Our stakeholder completed a personality slider in Phase 0 which we took into account in our deliberations.

We voted on FigJam using stickies to help further narrow the brand archetype and then drew out some characteristics for the top few archetypes. We used these to name our brand voice and to fill out the voice and tone section of our content style guide.

We used another TechFleet content style guide as inspiration then Keisha and I added an accessibility section to ours (accessibility is SO important!). We built our style guide in Google Docs with plans to incorporate the guide in to the UX design system once it was completed by the design team.

As with the content audit, we distributed the sections among pairs team members. We used a variety of existing content style guides as inspiration including those from MailChimp, A11y, and NHS. Once everything was complete, we met up for a critique and evaluated each section, adding notes and questions using the comment tool in Google Docs.

We submitted out final content style guide at the next Demo meeting and had a lively round of questions from our cross-functional teammates. Many people weren’t familiar with UX writing previously and it was exciting to see everyone so interested in what our team was doing.

The following image is the first page of the style guide and links to the full version in Google Docs.

Platform selection

A major part of this phase was researching platforms that offered the features that our stakeholder needed to grow the community. The development and strategy teams took this on during the first part of the phase, but as we moved along, it became apparent that each team would need to do their own evaluations.

UX writing and UX design teamed up on our evaluations and combed through each platform’s sales webpages to determine if they supported our criteria.

The following image is a screenshot of the spreadsheet we used to evaluate platforms.

Takeaways

Apprenticing at TechFleet was a wonderful experience and I am so grateful to have been selected to work on this project with such a great team. There were of course blockers and snags, including time zone issues, stakeholder availability, clarity about project goals, and more. Through it all, other teams continually praised the UX writing team for keeping in together, making great progress during each sprint, pivoting whenever the course of the project changed, and maintaining the entirety of our team through to the end of the phase.

In the eight short weeks, we were able to provide a handful of useful documents for future phases and evangelize the importance of writing in tech.

Thanks so much for reading!