UX Writing Process

I’ve been helping Symphony to establish UX writing, localization processes and content standards for their secure collaboration platform for the financial services industry.

Establishing writing as part of the design process

When I arrived, writers were accustomed to manual processes, copying and pasting ad-hoc text proposals back and forth with developers in Jira comments and revising existing copy in Google docs.

We’ve since graduated to a design process based on Figma, where writers and designers work together to tailor UI copy to the user flows early in the design process.

Automating content operations

Any subsequent modifications to the strings files in code now trigger notifications to writers, who approve all UI copy changes or suggest improvements directly in GitHub as part of the code review process.

I introduced an automated localization process based on Crowdin, which notifies translators whenever the English source strings change, and syncs new translations from the localization management platform to the GitHub repositories as part of the continuous integration process.

Defining content standards

As a core member of the team that built the Symphony design system, I developed content standards, writing guidelines, and UI copy patterns for use in the core component library.

For the initial launch of the design system, I built an internal microsite at symphony.design to document the components of the design system, including brand guide, content standards, and core library.