Content Strategy
Case Study:
User Roles & Descriptions
When creating new roles for users, product teams faced two primary setbacks:
1. they used internal language only understood within their working groups which
2. led to confused customers - cybersecurity specialists - navigating Software as a service (SaaS) interface.
The support department experienced a major uptick in troubleshooting tickets as users sought to understand more than 350 unique roles and their descriptions. Additionally, a new product was within development phase to allow system administrators to create custom user roles and descriptions.
The Project
The Tools
Miro, Figma, Microsoft Excel, Jira
My Role
Lead Content Strategist and UX Writer
Project Duration
February - April 2023
To standardize content guidance for engineering teams (totaling a minimum of 200 personnel) across all product teams.
My primary focus became identifying the needs of these engineering teams - especially teams without dedicated writing support. The end result would need to address new topics (our company would launch a new capability of ‘Custom User Roles’ within a few months) and any questions this new guidance would create. Additionally, I wanted to reduce troubleshooting tickets by at least 50% to minimize the man-hours allocated to this content design issue.
The Challenge
Content Alignment
I lead collaboration sessions with engineering teams, UX writers, and product managers to determine gaps in our current landscape which included lack of up-to-date content audits, confusion with existing style guide, and missing user research.
During a second round of collaboration sessions, each team and I performed an audit of existing content - what names and descriptions were each team assigning to user roles seen on their specific product platform’s interface.
Content Audit
After presenting audit highlights to the UX Writing department, I developed multiple production plans that:
1. communicated brand voice and tone,
2. left room for scalability,
3. could be accessed and used via the appropriate content management system (CMS), and
4. provided content guidance to teams without assigned writers ("Do this, not that.”)
Production Plan
A meeting with the support and sales teams produced a plan to measure support tickets and fielded user questions/feedback after 30 days. Support reported a 25% decrease in tickets. The sales department tracked only three (3) content-specific ‘Aha!’ reports for improvements to user roles and descriptions are launching this new guidance.
At the 3- and 6-month periods, new data will reveal areas where revisions and updates to content strategy and writing guidance are needed.
Performance Measures
Guidance was formatted and added to our CMS as a part of new product templates used across the platform.
Distribution Plan