Viewer Experience content guidelines — Hulu

 

The problem

Hulu didn't have any documentation for UX or technical writers to guide tone or style decisions. Our content was inconsistent, both in-app and in self-service channels.

What I did

As manager of the Product Education team, in 2019 I led the creation of the Viewer Experience content guidelines. They emphasized how to create content with user needs in mind, helped achieve consistency across all in-app and support content, and became a trusted resource for our team.

Here’s what I did as project lead:

  • Led two-hour content style guide workshops for different teams in our organization. I did this to create an initial shared understanding of our brand’s personality and style. It included exercises like brand perception scale, and a brand tone and voice brainstorm session.

  • Brought together representatives of “all the people who wrote” at Hulu, like corporate communications, UX writers, copywriters, and product education writers to talk about content best practices

  • Did a competitive analysis on other content guidelines for inspiration (Mailchimp, Intuit and Shopify’s were my north stars)

  • Drafted the guidelines

  • Asked for feedback from other writers at Hulu

  • Socialized them!

  • Trained my new direct reports on updating and owning them

Results

• One source of truth for all product education writers

• Sparked conversations with other writers within Hulu to agree on terminology and style

• Consistency on all of the content our team produced

• Influenced the inclusion of product and feature definitions, and descriptions on how we spoke about them, in the Product’s team go-to-market strategy

• Inspiration for the company-wide Tone of Voice and Stylebook created by Hulu's Brand and Creative teams. They realized we needed a content system that went into the specifics of how to write for all of Hulu’s channels.

(The pages below are representative samples of a 64-page document)

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People I worked with

• Product managers

• Product marketing managers

• Corporate communications specialists

• Product writers

• Campaign managers

• Legal


Next steps

We hosted the guidelines as a PDF on our internal knowledge base on Salesforce Communities, however, PDFs are not documents that weren’t easily editable by all Hulu teammates. Socializing and adoption is the last but probably most important step when creating guidance of any sort.

In the last quarter of 2019, I set up my team's Confluence space to document our processes and projects for visibility. One of the items on our roadmap for 2020 was for the Editor to migrate the guidelines to our wiki. This way it could be a living document that we could easily edit and even crowd-source revisions via the comments section.

I did not see the completion of this part of the project, but I'm confident these guidelines were the solid base our team needed to achieve consistency and to create relationships with other teams of writers within Hulu.