Ninja Van • 2022

Building the foundation: How content practice took shape in Ninja Van

Establishing a strong foundation for content excellence across teams and  driving consistency across products.

Overview

Ninja Van lacked a structured content practice, leading to inconsistencies across products and inefficiencies during designer-developer handovers. Designers grappled with unclear formatting standards and inconsistent tones, while developers encountered confusion due to unspecified or conflicting copy.
"I can't always remember what and how I write... "
‍– Product designer from Ninja Van
"It takes too much time to think about how I should write something in a certain format"
‍– Product designer from Ninja Van
To address these challenges, we introduced a comprehensive content practice with clear guidelines, fostering team alignment, streamlining workflows, and ensuring consistency across all products. This initiative enhanced operational efficiency and elevated the user experience by delivering clear, cohesive, and user-focused content.

Identifying the opportunity

Drawing from my experience in an organisation that upheld high content standards, I witnessed how well-structured content could significantly enhance the user experience by improving clarity, consistency, and accessibility. Intrigued by the potential of content design, I deepened my expertise by attending workshops and courses. A key takeaway from a workshop by Michael J. Metts and Andy Welfle, authors of Writing Is Designing, resonated with me:
"Without words, apps would be an unusable jumble of shapes and icons, while voice interfaces and chatbots wouldn't even exist.

Words make software human-centered, and require just as much thought as the branding and code.”
Recognising similar challenges at Ninja Van, I saw an opportunity for organisational and personal growth. Leading this initiative enabled me to apply my expertise, enhance my leadership and problem-solving skills, and collaborate with designers and developers to establish a shared vision for content excellence. I shared my observations with the design leads, who echoed my sentiments. Together, we identified the need for someone to take ownership of this initiative. With their support, I spearheaded a content practice to bridge gaps, align teams, and elevate the quality of Ninja Van’s content.

Problems

To better understand the issues, I facilitated discussions with designers and developers to uncover key challenges affecting our workflows. These discussions focused on identifying pain points in creating, managing, and handing over content during the product development process. The findings are categorised into the following problem analyses:

Problem analysis #1: Content as an afterthought

Symptom: Designers often overlook the content they write, leading to inconsistencies and ineffective communication within the product.
Problem: Content is undervalued as a core element of user experience. Designers address content too late, leaving insufficient time for refinement or integration into user flows. This leads to content misaligned with the product’s goals and user needs.
Evidence:
  • Frequent follow-up tickets are required to clarify vague labels or improve instructions based on user feedback.
  • Using industry-specific jargons that does not align with users' mental model.
Implications: 
  • A disjointed user experience that confuses users and delays task completion.
  • Increased workload for product teams due to repeated clarifications and revisions.
  • Damage to the product’s credibility, making it appear unprofessional or unreliable.

Problem analysis #2: Content inconsistencies due to lack of guidance

Symptom: Designers lack a centralised source of truth for crafting content, leading them to reference past screens or other products—often inconsistent and unreliable—when creating content.
Problem: The absence of a standardised guideline makes designers spend excessive time crafting content and attempting to maintain consistency across the product.Without clear standards, content remains inconsistent in tone and formatting.
Evidence:
  • Variations in button labels, date formats, and terminology across products or screens.
  • Tone inconsistencies, with some parts of the product sounding overly formal while others are casual or robotic.
Implications: 
  • Designers spend unnecessary time trying to ensure consistency, leaving less capacity for higher-value design tasks.
  • Content inconsistencies confuse users, undermining their confidence in the product.
  • The lack of a standardised approach exacerbates inefficiencies as the product scales.

Problem analysis #3: Inefficient collaboration between designers and developers

Symptom: Developers feel burdened during design handovers, often needing to clarify finalised content or make corrections to errors. They also handle time-consuming content updates in localisation platforms and the codebase.
Problem: The lack of structured content handovers leads to unclear responsibilities and inefficiencies in workflows between designers and developers.
Evidence:
  • No established practice of including detailed content specifications in tickets from the designer's side, leaving developers uncertain whether the provided copy is final or a placeholder.
  • Developers are tasked with populating localisation platforms, diverting them from core technical work.
Implications: 
  • Back-and-forth clarifications slow down development timelines and prolong the pipeline.
  • Incomplete or unclear content specifications increase the chances of errors being introduced into the product, negatively impacting the user experience.
  • Developers spend significant time on content tasks, reducing their ability to focus on technical implementation.

Goals

Internal goals

Establish clear content standards and guidelines:
  • Develop comprehensive content guidelines to align cross-functional teams, ensuring consistency in tone, formatting, and terminology.
  • Develop a content repository to serve as a reference for designers and developers, reducing reliance on inconsistent past screens or products.
Streamline content and localisation workflows:
  • Improve workflows for managing content updates, reducing back-and-forth clarifications between developers and designers.
  • Ensure content handovers are efficient and include all necessary specifications to minimise reliance on developers for clarification.
Foster ownership of content among designers: Encourage designers to take responsibility for content quality, ensuring that messaging is aligned with user needs, design intent, and product goals.

External goals

  • Ensure all product messaging maintains a cohesive tone, style, and terminology to create a seamless and intuitive user experience.
  • Adapt messaging to align with users’ expectations and mental models, ensuring clarity and relatability.
  • Ensure users have no confusion about the next steps by delivering clear, concise, and actionable content.
  • Enable users to independently complete tasks with ease, reducing their reliance on internal support teams.

Approach

Establishing a foundation with a content guideline

Objective: Resolve inconsistencies in tone, terminology, and formatting by creating a standardised content guideline.
Steps taken:
  • Creation of the content guideline— defining standards for tone of voice, formatting, terminology, and actionable messaging.
  • Collaborated with the marketing team to ensure the tone of voice and brand personality align with organisational branding while catering to product-specific needs.
  • Conducted sharing with designers to elaborate the importance of content as part of the design process and how to incorporate guidelines into daily workflows.
  • Introduced the content practice to the broader tech organisation, including developers and product maangers, to foster understanding and alignment on the importance of content consistency and accurate implementation.
How does this help:
  • Designers and developers have a clear reference for tone, terminology, and formatting, reducing inconsistencies in the product.
  • Designers spent less time deciding on common content elements.
  • Cross-functional teams were aligned on content expectations, improving communication and reducing misunderstandings.
  • The guideline serves to create a unified and professional voice for the product, boosting user trust and brand credibility.
Impact: 
  • Designers found the guideline easy to follow, making it a practical and intuitive tool during their design process.
  • Designers felt confident that by adhering to the guideline, their content would be consistent with other screens and products, leading to a cohesive user experience.
  • The presence of a clear guideline encouraged designers to think more critically about content as an integral part of their designs.

Introducing content management practices

Objective: Systematically manage content quality and accuracy throughout the product lifecycle.
Steps taken:
  • Conducted content audits to review and refine existing content for consistency, alignment with the guideline, and user-centric messaging.
  • Established a process to reduce back-and-forth during development, ensuring content accuracy and consistency across touchpoints.
How does this help:
  • Content audits identified and resolved inconsistencies before release, reducing errors in the final product.
  • Collaboration with engineers and QAs minimised back-and-forth clarifications, improving efficiency in development cycles.
  • Auditing established a systematic approach to maintaining content quality as the product expanded.
Impact: 
  • Reduced volume of tickets created to address inconsistencies or errors in content, saving time for both the design and development teams, enabling them to focus on other high-value tasks.
  • Regular audits ensured content was consistent, aligned with guidelines, and user-centric, resulting in a higher standard of content across the product.
  • By systematising content reviews and processes, the team established a framework that can easily scale with the growth of the product.

Improving collaboration between designers and developers

Objective: Optimise content and translation management by refining the workflows between designers and developers, reducing developer workload, and ensuring consistency in Lokalise and the codebase.
Steps taken:
How does this help:
Impact: 

Takeaways and reflection

What I've learned

Small intentions, big outcomes

This journey underscored the importance of treating content as a core element of design, rather than an afterthought. By introducing structured practices, I saw how small changes in workflows could have a significant impact on collaboration and product quality.

The value of collaboration

Collaborating with the marketing team and engineers taught me that aligning on processes early can bridge gaps and foster trust across teams, leading to more efficient workflows and better outcomes.

What I could have done better

One of the key lessons from this experience is the importance of planning for measurable outcomes, even for side projects. While qualitative feedback from the team highlighted significant improvements, having quantitative data—such as time saved, error reduction, or improved user satisfaction—would have provided concrete evidence of the impact. In the future, I plan to establish clear metrics and success criteria at the start of any initiative to better measure, track, and demonstrate its value.
 
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