Raising our voice
By: Gene Shannon
Tags: Content Strategy, Design Systems, UX, Voice And Tone, Design Thinking

Raising our voice

Last month, the voice and tone guidelines in Polaris were given a significant update. We sat down with senior staff content strategist Clay Delk to learn more about the changes and why the team decided to make them. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

What prompted the update to Shopify’s voice and tone guidelines?

Last year, as part of our first brand campaign, I worked with a group of designers and illustrators on Shopify’s “design language”. Looking at new visual styles and illustrations, we naturally started to think about tone. So, for example, I took the work we were doing for colors, illustrations, and campaigns, and started to think about, “What does that do to the product voice, and how can we adapt how we talk about Shopify’s voice to match these new guidelines?” It’s not a totally different personality, it’s actually very similar, but it helped us clarify that voice.

So are the new guidelines building on top of what came before, or is this a change?

It’s very much building on top of it. A lot of the voice guidelines are still the same, we just changed how we frame them. In terms of tone, I expanded on the guidelines and gave more nuance to what we had before. For example, the original tone guidelines just covered how to write for positive, neutral, and negative situations. These guidelines expand on those situations, because not all positive situations are the same and not all negative situations are the same.

One of the biggest changes was moving away from trying to anticipate what the audience is feeling and how to respond to that emotional state. Instead, we’re framing our recommendations around specific situations that we find in the product, and how we should respond as Shopify, without making assumptions about how those people are feeling.

One of the biggest changes was moving away from trying to anticipate what the audience is feeling.

In a positive situation we’d assumed they’re feeling fairly positive emotions, but you can’t always guarantee that. So an example, which I think a lot of people struggle with, is celebration. We always want to celebrate positive things. And we always want to be happy when we think people are going to be happy. But the reality is you can never assume that people are having a good day.

Even if somebody has reached their tenth sale or their hundredth sale, we don’t know how long it took them to get there and what it took. So we can’t do a blanket celebration and be super excited for them. But what we can do is recognize that it took a lot of work and it’s an accomplishment. We can congratulate them as professionals because we understand how much work it takes to get to that milestone.

What was the process for designing the guidelines? How did you test them?

First was listing out as many of these types of situations as I could come up with, still following that positive to neutral to negative continuum. I started off with the emotional approach to that, but quickly flipped it to be more about the context.

Then I found examples in the product for those situations. I asked the content strategy team for examples and went through the product auditing and copying-and-pasting and screenshotting all kinds of things. We definitely found some examples of error messaging or old work in the product that didn’t handle the situations as well as we would’ve liked, so we also got to fix some of those.

From there, I asked, “Why did we do what we did there, and how can we give people guidance on how to do it better?” That part happened over the course of a couple of months — it took a long time to pull all that stuff together, especially on a side-of-the-desk project.

After that, I sat down with various content strategists from the Polaris team and from the product teams to see if the guidance made sense. Then we spent some time testing out the guidelines and fixing things until we felt confident about being able to publish them to the Polaris site.

How did your thinking about Shopify’s voice evolve during this process?

One of the biggest challenges is that we’re talking to people across a wide spectrum of experience and context, but still about commerce and running a business. They are all experiencing very similar things, but some of them are brand new and doing this for the first time. Some of them are super-experienced and have been doing this forever and know way more about this stuff than we do. Some of them are doing it by themselves and doing every single thing on Shopify. And some of them are responsible for one tiny piece as part of a giant international retail organization.

So we have to write in a way that feels right for all of those people. That voice could be very boring and bland because we have to be vanilla for everyone. But we do try to have our own personality and be the experts who know what we’re talking about.

A big part of our unique voice is that — because we’re a part of so many businesses around the world — we have a lot more understanding of commerce than any other company does. But at the same time, we want to keep it approachable and human for your everyday business owner.

So we’re trying to be very professional and experienced and knowledgeable, but also not super-complex and complicated for people who use Shopify on a day-to-day basis. Even the smallest business owners are dealing with pretty complex things, so we have to find a way to talk to them, to help them get through that, and to let them do the things that are unique to their business.

How should people use these new guidelines?

They are best practices and guidelines, but there are going to be situations where your work doesn’t fall into one of these categories, or you have a specific reason not to follow the guidance. As long as you’re doing that for the right reasons, that’s okay. But trying to figure that out — knowing when is the right time to break the rules — is probably the hardest part, but it’s super important.

Another challenge is helping people understand that being more responsive to a specific situation, or a person’s emotional state or context, doesn’t necessarily mean more personality. It just means being more like a real person.

That’s one of the reasons why super positive or negative situations can go awry sometimes, because we need to have more of an emotional response in those situations, but that doesn’t necessarily mean being more emotional. It means being very aware of the situation and responding in the right way. When things are really bad, we can’t go really extreme with the personality, but we also can’t be totally inhuman either. There’s a middle ground there. Same when things are really good.

One of the things that I made a point of doing was talking to our incident response team and our support ops team — people who are talking to merchants every day in really good or really challenging situations. I learned how they talk to people and what their guidelines are for different situations. The guidelines that we have now aren’t just written by the product content strategists and aren’t just written for product. A lot of our guidelines for outages and downtime came from those discussions with the experts about their work.

It was nice to be able to bring in all of these experts from around the company that are doing this on a day-to-day basis and use that to give everybody better guidance.

What did you learn from that group that you might not have learned by just talking to people who work on product?

One of the examples in the guidelines is from when there was a big Internet-wide outage that affected Shopify. That team’s response and the way they wrote back to people in that situation really stood out to me.

On our status page there had been updates every few hours, or every few minutes, as they were figuring things out. And then at the end their message was what we now cite in the guidelines:

It was done in a very professional but apologetic way and it talked about what we were going to do to follow up to learn how to solve this thing and make it better in the long run.

Their messaging on that page was better than a lot of what we were doing in the product. So we were able to learn in some really interesting ways how to be more genuine and apologize and be empathetic, without coming across as disingenuous.

Were there other teams outside of product that influenced the guidelines?

The marketing content strategists were very involved in this project from the beginning. I started this process with a couple of content strategists from our marketing UX team, and it was really interesting to learn from them. A lot of people assume marketing is always going to be extreme and promotional and sales-y. But a lot of their approaches to landing pages and web pages were very similar to the way we talk in the product.

The context might be slightly different, and there is a little bit more motivating and encouraging action, but it wasn’t how many people would think about marketing and promotion. So it was nice to work on these together, find examples that came from ads or the website all the way through to the product, and show how we were doing similar things in different contexts.

Do you have any advice for people who are thinking about revising their own guidelines?

The most time-consuming part, but probably the most beneficial part, was going through and doing an audit of examples on our website, and in our product, and in our support docs, and in our incident response pages. Go through all the places you’re communicating with your audience and start to pull examples, good ones and bad ones, and then build your guidelines out of what’s working, or what’s not working.

There’s no point in trying to make it up from scratch. There’s already a ton of people doing this work at your company, most likely, and so you’re going to be much more successful going through and finding them, learning why they do it that way, and then write your guidelines based on what’s working.