Tame the Wild West of content
Content guidelines | Clover
Challenge
It was the Wild West when it came to the usage of content patterns throughout Clover’s system.
Opportunity
Create a centralized location for Clover’s Content Designers to document real-time content guideline decisions, with an accessible format that was easily referenced by Design, Product, and Marketing teams.
Background: The Wild West
Clover had no official content guidelines in place when I joined the company. Instead, a collection of incomplete Google Docs and spreadsheets were scattered across the server. A cluttered Slack channel was the go-to space for the 6-person Content Design team to ask questions about specific rules—though there was no system for tracking decisions. Content Designers relied on memory and Slack search results to piece together past decisions.
The absence of formal content guidelines was affecting both the efficiency of the Content Designers and the overall product experience.
Clover’s Content Designers were aware of the impact, but previous attempts to address it were overshadowed by other project needs. They were stretched too thin to make meaningful progress.
I took it upon myself to lead the overhaul of Clover’s content guidelines.
Adoption
While becoming recognized as the go-to Content Designer for guidelines, the new system I developed was widely adopted across Clover teams:
Content Designers appreciated having a single, easily accessible reference point for guidelines; it streamlined their workflow and improved consistency.
Product Designers used it to refine their initial design copy, ensuring clearer and more cohesive messaging throughout the product.
Marketing teams found it to be a valuable reference for aligning content across campaigns.
I collaborated with the Design Systems team to integrate the standards into Figma design components. This included standardizing placeholder copy for default error messages, help text, field labels, and notifications.
The collaboration also led to the Design Systems team building a dedicated content section within their design system website. Basic content guidelines would finally be presented in a more formal and structured way than the original Google Doc.
My role
As the Lead Content Designer, I:
Consolidated existing documentation and developed a streamlined format for new standards.
Worked cross-functionally to ensure other teams embraced the updated guidelines and transitioned away from the legacy standards.
Consolidate, scrub, and restructure
I began by collecting all existing documentation and then consolidated everything into a single, 100+ page Google Doc. I eliminated redundancies and removed unnecessary content. Next, I shared the document with the Content Design team and worked with them to identify which guidelines were outdated and which were still relevant.
Despite the cleanup, the document became cognitively overwhelming due to its sheer volume. Meanwhile, new guidelines were continuously emerging from ongoing projects.
As the consolidation effort gained momentum, the document became a focal point for the team, and designers began contributing new guidelines before the scrubbing process was complete.
While this was a positive step forward, it also made the document even more difficult to digest. To address this, I implemented a color-coded approval status key to clearly illustrate which guidelines were “complete” and which still needed to be reviewed and approved by the team.
Make it scannable and scalable
The guidelines were also reformatted for easy scanning and scalability as new rules were created. This included clear navigation and specific rules displayed in easily digestible tables with “what to do” and ”what not to do” examples.
AI consideration
I advocated for the adoption of a comprehensive content guidelines system with AI features, like Writer.ai, that could be integrated across our design system, email platforms, chatbot, and Figma. While an AI-enabled system was not implemented during my time at Clover, it sparked interest, and initial product demos were scheduled.