Content design system for Coursera
Project Goal: To create a content design system embedded within the Coursera Design System (CDS)
Lead: Deiadora
Collaborators: Lynn, Rory, and Clint (fellow content designers)
Key stakeholders: UX leadership team, engineering leadership, product management leadership
The challenge
When I arrived at Coursera, there weren’t any robust guidelines about how to write for the org. Until then, any UI text on the platform had been written by engineers mainly, followed by product designers, product managers, product marketing managers, and marketers.
The goal was to bring a set of guidelines together—alongside the components in the design system—to bring consistency and uniformity across the platform and elevate content design.
Overview
The problem: There wasn’t an established voice and tone or style guidelines for Courserians to follow. This made the UI text different everywhere you looked.
The data and research: As user research studies continued and customer feedback came in from learners and partners, it was apparent that the product didn’t have an overarching brand style and that some of the UI text caused confusion.
The goal: My hope was to bring style consistency and train as many Courserians that were writing and editing content by bringing awareness of the new content design system.
The team: I led a team of 3 content designers and worked closely with the design system designers and engineers.
The outcome: Coursera has a completed content design system used by hundreds that are writing and editing content, and greater style consistency on projects over the last 2 years and continuing.
The process
It started with voice and tone guidelines, followed by guidelines for formatting, punctuation, numbers, and content design writing principles. These were all alongside component guidelines used by designers, engineers, and content designers.
I audited every vertical at Coursera to understand the unique needs of each. I also did a competitive analysis of 10+ company’s style guides or content design systems. From this data, I was able to create content guidelines and content patterns that helped to define the brand.
Navigation
Embedded within the Coursera Design System (CDS) on Confluence, users could navigate to any page within the content design system from here and get an idea of what was in each section.
Voice and Tone
To follow our brand and design values and cover our 3 main audiences, the voice and tone guidelines provided a detail how-to. When followed, these kept our voice’s intention of being a knowledgeable yet equalizing authority in online education.
Style
Bringing together all of our formatting style onto one page, components could be looked up without having to sort through the entire design system for the content guidelines.
Other guidelines in the style section included numbers, punctuation, and principles. Ask for details.
Punctuation
Numbers
Terminology
What content design system is complete without a word list? Noticing the need to ensure products were title cased properly and features weren’t as well as commonly misspelled words, this living document held it all together.