Defining content standards

Background

The strength of a design system is in its content. A unified design language or development handoff process is great. But if products are communicating to users inconsistently, it doesn't matter if all the buttons look the same.

Working on design systems, my main aim is to evangelize content-first design. I accomplish that by creating robust and easily digested content standards for creating truly seamless experiences. These standards exist at both the component guidance and experience guidance levels. Here, we'll dive in to what these standards looks like at an atomic component level.

What I did

I treat content as the most integral tool for communicating to users in a predictable and understandable way. Clear component guidance allows design systems to establish and enforce mental models. That way, our users can get their tasks done without distraction.

Component content guidance includes information on voice, tone, terminology, casing, and punctuation. It also, and perhaps more importantly, includes content strategy considerations that affect global UX. For example, the content guidance for Fluent's switch component gives strategies and examples for how to include additional information in a lightweight component.

Regularly surfacing content strategy in component guidance emphasizes the importance of thinking about when and how we surface information. It allows other practitioners to participate in and spread content work, thereby strengthening the discipline throughout the organization.