Joanna Hofer

Style Guide

MAP Help Center Style Guide Table of Contents included the following sections: Overview, Usage, Specifications, Writing difficulty, Help Center content organization, tables, images, microcontent guidance, inclusive design considerations, related, reference links, and list of terms.

Help Center Style Guide Table of Contents

Case Study – Help Center Style Guide

The Help Center content had been developed without decision documentation or style guidance. Because of this, inconsistencies were affecting the look and feel as well as the consistency and usability of the user experience. We needed to set a baseline for how content would be written and ensure future content would be consistent. We decided to not fix legacy content because it was vast and would eventually be phased out.

Request – Keep Help Center content consistent; establish a place to record style decisions

My Roles – Creator, Writer

Timeline – 1 month

Result – Was the first adopted style guide for the NWEA MAP Help Center; added to the NWEA Design System

Process

  1. Use UX Content Collective UX Writer Certification course notes to draft guide
  2. Add content guidance that I already knew was needed
  3. Request Help Center team to review
  4. Revise
  5. Hand off to UX Design System team

Highlights

Explains that the voice of the Help Center is should be written in the second person and that the user should be addressed as You. Aim to keep copy clear, concise, complete, and correct.
The Accessibility section provides guidance for how to write alt text, image captions, and table titles.
The Table section instructs writers on how to refer to tables in body copy and provides and example.
Help Center content organization centers around how to write the page title, page description, table of contents and the first section.
The numbers section gives rules for how to handle numbers in copy.
The sentence case section advises writers to use sentence case for all headings except for the H1 heading, body copy, bullets, content in table cells, image captions, video captions and alt text.
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