Democratizing the style guide

The problem

After I rotated off the Design System at Compass, I helped launch our Content as a Service team. Taking in requests from dozens of teams, I was able to see the opportunity for (1) creating greater consistency across features, (2) reducing the amount of time a content designer spends responding to common questions, and (3) adjusting existing guidelines to reflect rapid change in this start-up environment.

I realized that our team was making micro-decisions everyday that lived and died in Slack channel histories and one-off Figma files.

My role

I proposed, launched, and socialized a process for our Content Design team to easily update our style guide as a living document, adding piecemeal updates and elaborations through everyday learnings.

• We’d throw questions or proposals into a new Slack channel focused on style guide topics.

• We’d discuss in threads, and start drafting guidelines right there.

• We’d decide where it belongs in the site IA.

• We’d create a ticket in our project management tool if we can’t add content to the style guide right away.

• We’d add to our wiki, and share the link in the thread.

Outcome

After implementing this process, our team captured dozens of decisions on the style guide site.

Some of the decisions were tiny, but had a big impact because so commonly used: What do we think about “and/or” and the use of slashes in UI copy in general? How do we capitalize “Terms and Conditions”? What format do we use for writing time zones? Other decisions were more comprehensive, such as content guidelines for filtering and sorting.

This process gave content designers more agency, saved our time, and contributed to a community of practice.