How to Organize a Style Guide

How do you organize a style guide? The information architecture of a style guide impacts why people use it, how often they seek it out, and when they think to reference it. The IA also makes some assumptions (or preferably, builds on knowledge) around who the audience is, and what knowledge they have.

In a recent client project we faced this very question, and considered three possible solutions to organize the style guide.

Style Guide by Audience

Some style guides are intended for use across organizations with multiple different audiences: editors, writers, videographers, designers, etc. Or, the organization may have several brands, with guidelines that differ for each.

For these companies, the best way to organize a style guide might be by audience. An audience-driven style guide has the Brand or Titles at the top level, and assumes that the audience will self-identify to dig deeper.

Ben & Jerry’s has content creators working on illustrations, and others using photography. For their style guide the audience is the first consideration.

Style Guide By Guideline

Another way to organize a style guide is by the type of guidelines. Perhaps there are certain guidelines that everyone in the company looks for - such as “Capitalizations”, “Voice and Tone”, or “Grammar issues”. This is particularly likely if the organization has outside writers working for them, who may not become easily familiarized with the basic guidelines.

In these cases, even if there are multiple brands, that designation becomes secondary to the guideline people are likely to search for. Allowing people to easily skim through “Grammar Issues” is helpful when coming up against the serial comma!

Cigna’s Digital Experience Standards are a great example of a style guide organized by guideline.

Style Guide By Content Type

A third way to organize a style guide is by content type. Perhaps your team works in numerous mediums, from video to blogs to press releases to social media. The style, the voice, even the grammatical rules may change from one to the next! Whether the same content creators must bounce between content types, or whether the creators are self-selecting their area of interest, content type is a useful hierarchy when multiple mediums are involved.

Mailchimp’s Voice and Tone style guide showcases how to organize guidelines by content type.

How Do You Organize a Style Guide?

To choose the best way to organize a style guide you first must consider:

• How many people are using this? 
• How do they categorize themselves (e.g. writers vs editors, or videographers vs bloggers)?
• What common questions do they ask, that this style guide will answer?

With these three questions you’ll be well on your way to determining the architecture and hierarchy of your style guide. 

The business value of UX design

What do your friend's startup, your small local business and a large company such as Google have in common? No, this isn't a trick question.

The answer is actually fairly simple and intuitive. All of the aforementioned businesses depend on users enjoying their products and services in order to continue doing business successfully.
In the recent years many have noticed the importance of UX design and are investing more and more into its research and development.

Be it physical or digital, a product is bound to rouse both an emotional and intellectual response in its consumer based not only on the way it works but also how it looks and feels. Whether that experience is going to be a good one or a bad one is going to make an effect on your sales, and this is exactly where a good UX design team proves itself to be absolutely crucial. 

Why “X” marks the spot

UX design is about two things only – the User and the Experience. Give your users a positive experience and they will reward you with their trust and their business. Companies with highly effective UX have increased their revenue  by 37%, and top 10 UX leaders in America outperform the S&P with close to triple  the returns - a significant lead.

When experiencing your product leaves the user with a foul taste in their mouth, they will quickly take their business elsewhere. 90% of users reported they stopped using an app due to poor performance, and 86% deleted or uninstalled an app as a result of encountering problems with it's functionality or design. Studies show that 86% of users think that an exceptional customer experience is worth paying extra. With these figures in mind, it is not difficult to understand why user experience focused companies like Apple, Google, Adobe, Dropbox and Amazon are year after year leaders of their respectable fields.

While having a great product is paramount, in today's market it often is not enough to keep you ahead of the curve.

This is why investing into UX design has proved to be a game-changing strategy.  A pleasing UX has been proven to earn the users' interest, business, and most of all – their loyalty. 48% of users say that arriving on a business site that isn't working well on mobile will be seen as an indication of the business simply not caring, and 52% said that a bad mobile experience made them less likely to engage with a company in the future.

The principle extends beyond just mobile devices; 40% of users will abandon a web page if it takes more than three seconds to load, while 79% will search for another site to complete their task.

Designing experiences

But what about design? How important is actual aesthetic property of your website (or a product) when it comes to user experience?

An experiment conducted by M. Tractinsky tested relationships between users' perceptions of a computerized system's beauty and its usability.
Its outcome showed that, undeniably, the role the aesthetics plays in HCI design is a major one, and should be kept in mind at all times when catering to the users' needs.



It seems safe to conclude that the business value of UX design is so colossal, one can simply not afford to ignore the importance of a highly skilled team of UX designers putting their expertise into crafting the experience your users are going to undergo and enjoy while engaged with your service or product.

Engaging and connecting with the users is what every company should strive toward, and what good UX design helps you achieve. With design focused on UX, a company is forced to create for their customer. A relationship is formed and it grows, bonding the customer with the product.

References: View original link to article

About Author:

Ines Anić (@i_anic) is a Content and Administrative Associate at UX Passion, where she writes about UX, UI, design and social media management. She is passionate about UX, Usability, web design and video games; and curious about technology, gadgets, IT and the world of startups. Ines is looking forward to connecting with you on LinkedIn and Twitter!