Are your tone of voice guidelines fit for purpose?
Content strategists or copywriters create brand tone of voice guidelines to ensure every customer-facing piece of communication feels consistent. A great brand voice is one that conveys the brand’s promises, in a way that’s instantly recognisable. Having a strong, distinctive voice not only creates cut-through, but applying it consistently across the whole brand experience builds trust and rapport with customers.
When the brand’s voice changes, it can be disorientating for customers. John Saito from Dropbox says:
“…if an actor does something that seems out of character, your audience will immediately notice and it breaks the scene. It’s the same way with writing. If your user suddenly reads a line of text that sounds unlike anything else in your product, it breaks the experience and makes your user start doubting you.”
So when you have multiple people writing for a brand, these guidelines are vital. But how many digital design teams actually use these when writing for the brand’s UI copy? In my experience very few. But there’s a pretty good reason for this – the guidelines are often just not fit for purpose. Here’s why I think tone of voice (TOV) guidelines need an evolution so they’re useful and usable for every kind of content creation.
Understanding voice vs tone
Tone of voice is actually a misleading name as tone and voice are different. Your voice is how you speak – the words you choose, how you sound, and what makes you recognisable as you. Your tone is how you adapt your voice and pitch to a situation or scenario.
For example, I always sound like me, but my tone will be very different for each of the following scenarios:
- Shouting at my kids to get their shoes on because they’re late for school
- Asking my elderly grandad whether he’d like a slice of cake with his tea
- Swearing loudly when I burn my arm on the grill
In Anna Pickard’s great webstock talk she discusses the spectrum of tone. There are times when our pitch is at the all singing, all dancing, rainbow unicorn levels, and other times when we’re at more serious, sedate level. But most of the time our tone is somewhere in the middle.
The problem is that TOV guidelines are often written with the full in-your-face brand communications in mind (such as marketing). And while it might be appropriate to ramp up the brand’s characteristics in marketing copy, it’s just not appropriate for instructional copy or error messages.
Determining your tone
When designing UI copy, one of the most important skills for a content designer is empathy. Recognising a user’s potential emotions in the particular scenario you’re designing for, determines the tone you might use.
In Nicole Fenton’s book Nicely Said there’s a great matrix that explains how tone should vary, here’s an extract:
It’s often hard to know how to get the tone right without losing brand personality (or your voice) completely. It’s one thing to dial down the brand voice, but dial it too far in the wrong way and you’re in an equal mess. Getting this right takes practice.
Balancing the good with the bad
I find that TOV guides featuring ‘What we are’ and ‘what we’re not’ sections can be quite helpful to get the balance just right.
Let’s look at an example here of how these could help. Imagine the brand’s TOV guidelines say:
- We are exciting but not hyperactive
- We are adventurous but not irresponsible
- We are helpful but not controlling
– and you’ve been asked to write a travel reminder notification.
You could go with:
“Your travel day is almost here — whoop! Hope you’ve packed! And don’t forget, you must print your tickets off before you fly! 🍹”
Yes it’s exciting, and adventurous — but look again.
Too many exclamation marks and ‘whoop!’ makes it far too hyperactive. Cocktail – potentially not on the responsible side, and ‘you must’ is quite controlling.
Let’s try again:
“It’s almost time for your big adventure, so don’t forget to print your tickets off before you fly! If you need any help, just call us on 0800 123123 🏝”
It’s dialled back but still delivers the brand values.
Now what if you were writing for the same brand but an error message for their card being declined? Clearly in this instance, the adventurous and exciting characteristics aren’t of use. But the helpfulness is.
Go too far in the brand voice and you could end up with something awful like:
“Whoops no funds — perhaps you spent too much on your last trip! Try another card!”
But keep the appropriate elements and you’d get:
“We couldn’t take payment from that card. Please try another one, or call us on 0800 123123.”
Good guidelines should help you with any form of writing, so if you’re creating guidelines then stress test them against a few content examples or scenarios and see how they work.
Styling it out
When it comes to interaction writing for a product (or indeed any kind of microcopy) what you also need is a style guide. Consistency across web journeys is particularly bad when pages are worked on in isolation and the journey’s evolved in some places but not others.
Working in sprints, making conversion improvements, and not having one content expert owning the content have resulted in terrible inconsistencies for online brand experiences.
Without strong enough guidelines to follow it’s no wonder this is the case.
I’ve worked on massive high street brands where there isn’t even a consensus between the product writers as to whether the brand uses ‘thanks’ or ‘thank you’. And that’s just one word in a sea of thousands.
Defining your house style means that any of your writers should be able to apply a consistent approach to your choice of words. This should include such detail as:
- The greetings you use (such as hello, hi there or good morning)
- How you chose to use special characters such as ampersands
- How you format dates and and times
- Button labels — do you use next or continue, go back or return?
- How you use bullets (and capitals or no?)
- Page header rules
- Help copy formats
This list could keep me going all night so I must move on, but you get the idea.
The good news is, it’s never too late to start documenting what you currently use and what you want to define as your standards to work towards. Keep a shared file that contributors can add to. And look at the Guardian style guide or the Mailchimp guide for inspiration (Mailchimp’s even includes writing for translation).
A common language
If you have products or services to sell, it’s so important that everyone who writes for the brand is describing them consistently across the customer’s experience.
Imagine getting to the check-out page and seeing what you thought you were purchasing being described completely differently. The element of doubt it puts in your mind is almost always enough for you to walk away without buying.
TOV guidelines often fail to include ‘house’ terminology or agreed descriptions. Creating a shared language doesn’t mean jargon that means little to anyone outside the company. It means creating customer-friendly, simple descriptions that can be used on any part of your website, in emails or texts, and even in call centres.
Putting it all together
In essence TOV guidelines need to go so much deeper than they often do. They should include:
- The voice of the brand
- Guidance on how your tone should adapt
- The house style
- Common language/terminology
I really haven’t covered accessibility except to say that it’s a must when writing for usability. But there are plenty of existing resources like this one to help, and the work that Content Design London have been doing around readability guidelines is fantastic.
Ideally the content should be pulled together by a content strategist, in collaboration with brand, and the content designers (or UX writers) who work on product writing.
Once created, your content guide needs to live and breathe somewhere so it’s actually used. Platforms like Notion or Google Pages that are easy to share and edit are ideal. In a perfect world our UI content would be built into design systems. This is great for things like button labels, and straightforward interaction content, but less useful for voice and terminology. Although Google and Shopify have both got great content design systems which do include language guidance.
Finally, let’s rename TOV guidelines
Ditching a TOV doc in favour of style guides, content manuals or content design systems might be just the push some businesses need in starting to think more broadly than marketing copy.
Focusing on the importance of UI copy and the value of consistency across the entire customer experience, really highlights how essential content experts are to a business. Particularly one that wants to scale up but still provide a seamless brand experience.
If you’d like to read more about the importance of content experts, my book Why you need a content team is now available on Amazon.
