This year the User Experience Service have been working on improving the editorial style guide. For context, Nick Daniels has written about why we embarked on this project:

Why we’re refreshing the editorial style guide

Our Digital Content Style Guide intern, Hannah Watson has also written about the results of the survey we conducted to get views on the usage and experience of those who have interacted with the style guide.

An analysis of responses to our editorial style guide survey

In this post, I will focus on the work we’ve done to review and rewrite the pages within the formatting section of the style guide.

We started with the formatting section to bring the guidance in line with our content design training

We’ve recently reworked our Effective Digital Content (EDC) online training course. You can read more about this in our blog series:

Our six-part series on building the Effective Digital Content course

Given the close connection between EDC and the style guide, it was important that both were consistent.

It made sense to start with the formatting section of the style guide as it had pages on headings and links – both of which are key topics of EDC, which we’d done a lot of research on. We felt it would be good to revisit the style guide pages on these topics first, incorporating what we’d recently learnt.

Once these two pages were complete, we then started to work on the wider topics within the formatting section.

Working collaboratively as a team has been crucial to the process

We realised pretty early on in the review process that it wasn’t something that one person in the team could easily do independently.

Our first collaborative writing session highlighted just how much we all benefited from sharing ideas and discussing how best to approach potential changes. We found working on a shared document (live editing as we went) was much more efficient than each working on individual drafts. Therefore, we adopted this approach going forward.

A prototype style guide site enabled us to visualise changes and try out different layouts

We created a prototype style guide site which allowed us to mock up how the new pages would look when implemented on the style guide website.

The prototype was really useful to evaluate different design choices in a more realistic way than Word documents allowed for. It also provided a better way to assess how effective the page was during usability tests.

Continuous usability testing has provided invaluable insights

From the outset of our review process we were keen to involve members of the community that would be using the style guide. We did this by arranging multiple usability tests with willing volunteers over Teams, using the prototype style guide site.

These calls were invaluable to test out our ideas and check the usability of newly formulated pages. It also gave us the opportunity to hear about participants’ experiences of using the current style guide, including areas/rules they felt were hard to understand or implement and gaps where guidance was lacking.

These insights helped us to evolve and improve our content to make sure that it was meeting the needs of the style guide users.

We’ve added in more practical examples

One clear insight we gained from usability testing and also the survey results was that more practical examples would be helpful. We kept this in mind as we went through our review and have expanded the number of examples, as well as improving existing ones. We’ve also clearly signposted the examples on the pages to allow for quick reference.  Hopefully this will help people to more easily understand the style guide principles and see how to apply them in practice.

Creating a change log ensured we had a record of each change and why we made it

We wanted to ensure we kept a track of the changes as well as the reasons behind the decisions we made so we had a record to refer back to.

The process of creating this document involved reviewing each page and evaluating what we had changed and why. It was a useful exercise which entailed quite a critical evaluation of our work as we had to explain the choices behind each design and content change decision.

We categorised the updates within the change log to make them easier to reference and also included a section for the Editorial Working Group to write comments and feedback.

The process has been time consuming but rewarding

We’ve dedicated a lot of time to working on each of the style guide pages we’ve tackled so far, to hopefully create an informative resource for users. We’ve had to consider how to explain often inherently complicated grammatical rules in simple terms, account for nuances, identify edge cases and provide well thought through examples.

The reward has come when we test the new versions with web publishers and receive positive feedback. Often this can be after multiple iterations of the page, but we’ve seen a few ‘ah ha’ moments when people who had been unsure about a particular aspect, now have a better understanding of how to apply one of the rules, or have commented that the guidance is clearer.

The process has also helped us to deepen our knowledge and understanding of writing styles, editorial practices and practical application of grammatical rules and conventions.

Next steps

We’ve recently published the updated style guide pages on headings and links.

Headings and page titles 

Links

We’ve also been rewriting and testing the new versions of the other pages in the formatting section which we hope will be published shortly.

How you can get involved in shaping the new style guide

We are always on the look out for willing volunteers to test out new versions of style guide pages. If you would like to get involved, please get in touch with the User Experience Service: user-experience@ed.ac.uk