Building a glossary: the importance of a collaborative construction
By: Suzana Demetrio
Tags: Gympass, Glossary, Ux Writing, Content Design, UX

Building a glossary: the importance of a collaborative construction

More than identifying terms and their meanings, we need to understand what they mean in people’s daily lives.

Scrabble game pieces

Do you know that talk that a company’s voice is unique? Well, in practice it is not that simple because a company is made up of people and each person has their own voice.

Here at Gympass, the voice-building work has several initiatives, one of the most important is our glossary.

Doing this type of work requires time and dedication, but more than that, it requires the effort of many people. After all, all these people stop talking as individuals to speak the same language as the company.

Precisely for this reason we chose to create our glossary in a collaborative way.

Collaboration for satisfactory results

In our experience, involving people from different areas with a common objective — even in many cases, increases the duration of the process — always leads to amazing results.

Now, taking some steps back, how did we come up with the idea of a collaborative creation and how has it worked in practice?

Understanding the pain points

We realized that some words that we use in the product, for example, have different meanings in other areas, which causes a lot of confusion for our clients, users and employees.

Considering that, we decided to interview different areas of the company to discover the most problematic words and understand the biggest pains and language challenges.

By creating a glossary, besides unifying all terms used in the company, both for internal and external audiences, we ensure consistency and clarity in our communications.

Important to know:

All of this we’ve been talking about is beautiful in the theory, but it only works if everyone uses this material daily as a source of truth.

In other words, more than a practical work of research and writing, there is also a serious evangelisation effort.

Beta version

Well, with this first information collected and analyzed, we were able to start the beta version of our glossary.

We did it in a spreadsheet format, with the following columns:

- Term

- Definition

- Example of a sentence using the term

- Name of the contributor

- Department

- Questions (I will explain the last item in a bit)

When we got to a consistent amount of words, we opened the material for collaboration, distributing it through all the company and leaving the access granted to any employee.

“Okay, but what about when there is a question of meaning?”

This is where the ‘question column’ comes in.

Whenever someone has a problem with the meaning, they just have to use this space to talk about it. So, we got together to specifically discuss each question, involving the areas of interest in that word.

How is the glossary nowadays?

The glossary has been progressing a lot, after all it is a living document that evolves with each change of terminology or new appearance of a new term, and has become an official document.

Today it is divided into 5 sections, with terms alphabetically ordered in each one to facilitate navigation.

They are:

Business protagonists, the terms that define our stakeholders, our departments, and our types of business.

Inside the product, the terms used on the product (both app and website) to describe actions, define next steps or describe a section.

Tools and processes, the terms that define the tools used internally or to improve the external stakeholders’ experience, plus our internal processes and methodologies.

Data definitions, those global terms usually used to define important data for business tracking, strategy, and decisions.

Inclusive language, alternative terms everyone can start using in place of more common options, to make language more inclusive and be thoughtful of all kinds of audiences when communicating.

Next steps

The idea is to make the glossary more and more useful.

Ideally, we would like to add hyperlinks and make them interchangeable, as it happens in an online dictionary; if a term is mentioned in one of the descriptions, you could click on it and go to their own definition.

On the platform we currently use, this is not possible, but the plans exist and, as soon as possible, we will evolve the project to this direction :)

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Someone with a similar experience? Let’s chat!