Building content design at a property platform valued at nearly $3B
How we created a strong culture in UX Writing and Content Design here at Loft, a Brazilian proptech startup.
By Jairo Assunção and Maria Santos.
This post was published originally in the Loft’s Medium, in Portuguese. I decided to translate it (free translation) to reach out to more people since our learning in Content Design can add value to any other design team around the world.
When Loft started in São Paulo, three years ago, we had a massive real estate presence only in affluent neighborhoods, so we gained a reputation as a platform for the “elite”.
This was also reflected in the way we used to communicate to our audience. Internally, some people at Loft were writing in a “fancy” tone, others in a casual one. There was inconsistency and different personalities came through our brand’s voice. Clearly, a great demand for thinking about content in a more organized way was needed.
In a year and a few months, between mistakes and successes, we build some pillars in this organization within the ‘content’ field. We are going to share a little bit of this experience in this article.
Trust through words
At Loft, our mission is to help people make their big Brazilian dream come true: find the perfect home. Beyond the data, artificial intelligence, and new features, our main tool is for building a relationship of trust during this great step in people’s lives.
Is not too easy to imagine so many people are behind an app, website, or digital platform, even more in companies that grow as fast as Loft. Here it is really impressive how many people are developing each interaction. And all of them, including designers, are responsible for content creation. It is awesome to have a team capable of creating agile and independent solutions, considering that:
Each word has a purpose and is oriented to clients and company’s goals.
A democratic voice
The journey of buying and selling a property is long, and, frequently, uses formal and technical language.
Because of this, UX Writing has become more relevant in delivering useful information, at the right moment, and without jargon.
Words are the base of the experience and trust that we want to deliver .
The search for a consistent and unique voice in this journey became a challenge for us, therefore we confronted it with research about personas and the creation of the content style guide.
We envisioned a more democratic conversation with people from different regions of the city as a possibility. For this, the following initiatives were essential:
Content Style Guide
This kind of material comes not from only one person’s perspective. This guide reflects our brand and business goals. Everybody who writes for Loft finds out the best practices for our voice and tone, glossaries, message architecture, inclusion language, error messages, naming, content tests, and more.
We love to see our colleagues discovering this guide and using it in their work.
The next step is to make this guide more accessible, from Confluence to Frontfy, since the Confluence platform is not available to all Loft’s teams.
Design Talk
Once we had this documentation, we needed to spread it to the maximum number of people at the company. So, we used a place in “Design Talk”, an internal event, to introduce the Content Guide Style to the whole team.
This workshop was not just for the design team. In fact, it helped us to win a space on Loft’s onboarding to new Lofters (Loft employees), so every new employee could have a guide to write for the company.
Knowledge pills
We have created a channel on Slack to share best practices from our Content Style Guide more regularly, answer people who have questions during their projects/tasks, and also keep it a hot topic. We always use short posts to keep a light and informal tone to the conversation.
Recently, we have also collaborated with other departments, such as SEO, Customer Experience, CRM, and different squads to bring new content.
Consultancy
The idea is never to centralize the content creation, rather give every designer the autonomy to produce their own content. However, sometimes, they have no confidence in writing and not much time to think thoroughly about content strategy. Therefore they can find help from content specialists.
Naturally, the influence and demand for UX Writing have increased. Because of this, it is necessary to have the clearest process and SLA possible.
The position of UX writer, at Loft, started at Design Ops. This is a cross-company team that provides a holistic view and consultancy method. Now, we also have some specialists working in tribes, closer with contexts and decisions, and with product designers and product managers.
Content Guild
We understand guild as a collaboration between people who share interests and goals in some organization. Here, at Loft, besides the UX writers, we have design managers that help us in our mission:
Bring a consistent, clear, and unique voice to the real estate market.
In our meetings, we think together in our routine’s deliveries and discuss concepts, and plan about the future of our guild at the company.
Right at the beginning of our organization as a guild, we discussed a lot about our environment in the corporation. We realized that we are involved in much more beyond the UX copy. We are connected to many departments and communication formats, with a strategical view that is user-driven and we are aiming toward business goals.
The strategy also in the title
The title UX writer worked really well to introduce this subject to the design team and at the company. However, from the discussions in our guild, we assumed content strategy as an evolution that better reflected this 360° view and our focus on the strategy itself, instead of only UX copy.
We love to work in naming, so, right now, we are going to change the name of our title again. As the company is still growing fast, we think content design helps us to localize ourselves better at the corporation, because other departments can also use content strategy.
The “big content meeting”
With more people looking at Loft content, we started to exchange knowledge and share challenges with them more frequently, so we can benefit each other: SEO talking to Social Media, Growth collaborating with Content Design tests, everybody working closely with Branding to define new positioning.
We noticed that in some moments different departments were producing similar material with the same goal, such as communication templates, playbooks, and workshops. So, why not join forces? That’s what we started to do by introducing our monthly “big content meeting”.
How we measure the impact
Governance is key to guarantee learning and improvement, therefore, we need clear success metrics. This way content design can also be part of our product’s pillars. Take a look at how we apply it to numbers:
Content success
This example is about support metrics, but traffic metrics as page views are also common as a way to check the content success.
KPI: 20% fewer support requests for “property viewing cancelations”.
Why: indicates that the audience can find the information easily.
User experience
Usability tests, interviews, and content research are all fundamental factors needed to check the user experience.
KPI: 80% of the users show on CSAT that they can identify our tone and voice in our interactions.
Why: indicates that Loft’s voice is applied and noticed without impacting the user experience.
Content quality
The content is accurate, updated, the grammar is correct.
KPI: 95% of the content is approved by content designers.
Why: indicates the facility to consume our information.
More content quality validations: we also check our voice and tone application, our culture pillars, our value proposition, and our experience criteria.
Our team outline
Nowadays, our content designers are in tribes and design ops. Loft always invests more in user experience, and consequently, in design. We can see this through the number of new faces that we welcome to the design team every week.
All the segments in design are expanding (service design, product design, specialists, research), including content design. We celebrate each new person because it always means a world of new pieces of knowledge. How we are today:
Content process
Sometimes, people ask us about the right moment to involve content designs in the product process. Our position is still strongly related to proofreading, a legacy from copywriters, but we have different techniques and objectives. For us:
The word choices are design choices, guiding users through the product experience.
We have responsibilities and techniques for each step in the product process, as a product design. Basically, the perfect moment to involve content design is always the same: right from product discovery.
Upcoming in content design
At Loft, we feel we can change the real estate market and how people communicate in this industry. We have ambitious goals for UX writing and content design at the company, in Brazil, and globally.
Follow Loft Design Team on Instagram.
Would you like to join us at Loft and be a part of this changing market? Check out: https://jobs.lever.co/loft
