Background

With the Design System team kicking off, preliminary work focused on the foundations on the system. One of the focus areas underlining the core foundation was the product voice. Almost everything else – colors, fonts, styles – are built on top of the voice. This voice persona work quickly became a high profile project.

Key collaborative partners: User Experience Researcher, Design Technologist

Supporting team members: Director of User Experience, User Interface Product Architect, User Experience Designer

Supporting resources: Finding Your Global Voice presented by Tina O’Shea (LavaCon 2018), The Hero and The Outlaw by Margaret Mark and Carol Pearson, Nicely Said by Nicole Fenton and Katie Kiefer Lee

Approach and solution

Partnering with a UX Researcher, we started by gathering user data.

• Conducted two surveys – a customer one and an employee one – and a series of executive stakeholder interviews. We received data from 63 customers, 33 employees, and 7 executive stakeholders.
• Held two cross-discipline working sessions with people throughout the company. 

From this data, we put together a first pass at emerging themes, and I drafted information about our three core voice attributes – empowering, reliable, and relatable – and rewrote a few initial messages.

Then, we conducted a series of usability tests and did a second round of internal stakeholder interviews to get ensure our analysis of the initial data was valid.

During this testing, we presented our proposed voice persona, the three voice attributes, and the messages that I rewrote. We also provided similar voice persona and attributes to check our decisions against other options.

Sample before screen, with corporate branding removed:

Sample after screen, with corporate branding removed:

Changes made: To better align with the new voice persona, we rephrased and refocused the message from you, as the user, to us, as the company. You didn’t do something, we did. So, we wanted to own up to the fact that the change was on us. And, you might end up losing changes if you hadn’t saved recently when this message appears. Likewise, you don’t have an option to refresh or not, so we removed the word please. Finally, we added the value of refreshing the screen. 

After validating our work and making some minor tweaks to the voice persona, our UX Director presented the new voice live on the mainstage at our company’s annual customer conference.

Live voice and tone information in the Design System: http://styleguide.boomi.design/#VOICE_AND_TONE

Lessons learned and takeaways

By including multiple rounds of user testing in our work, we avoided settling on a voice persona that customers didn’t like. Despite positive internal feedback on the early draft persona, customers viewed it negatively, forcing us to revisit our persona and adapt it to better align with how customers viewed our voice. 

Due to time and resource constraints, we didn’t have an opportunity to extend the voice persona and attributes outside of a North American perspective. As a global company, it would be important to follow up with international testing, especially in markets that are more formal than the United States. I left the company before that expanded scope of work was undertaken.

Awards

• LavaCon Content Strategy Conference Content Impact Award of Distinction for making a positive content impact on the organization by using a takeaway from a prior LavaCon as the jumping off point for our own voice persona work.