This is a ready-to-go starter kit for your product team’s copywriting and style guidelines:

• Useful and semi-universal guidelines for strong UX copywriting.
• Real examples that you can use as a starting point, and replace with examples from your own product.
• Uses Next.js and Tailwind CSS to turn markdown-based documentation into a minimal but useful static site (you’re using it now!) that can be built and deployed with Vercel, Netlify, or other tools of choice.

Use this site as your own reference for UX copywriting or get the framework on GitHub.

Why a product language framework?

Content and copywriting guidelines are an amazing way for product teams to:

• Create consistency across the product to make a usable, predictable, and on-brand experience.
• Empower teams to make easier for anyone to write clear, effective, and useful content.
• Drive positive change in language standards to create compassionate, inclusive, and respectful products.

The problem is, guidelines take a lot of work to create. And, there’s a large barrier to adoption in that if they aren’t easily edited and made available to the rest of the team, they aren’t likely to be used.

While there are a few wonderful examples of existing content guidelines out out on the internet, these existing references tend to belong to large companies and aren’t open-sourced for easy repurposing and adaptation by other product teams for their own use.

This product language framework is a solution to these problems: it’s a complete set of useful and semi-universal guidelines for strong UX copywriting that can be customized and extended for your own product, and it’s a minimal static site that can be built, deployed, and put to use in seconds.

Usage

Fictional product: Foreword

To provide realistic and useful examples throughout the guidelines, the language framework is built to support a fictional product: Foreword, a platform for people to ask for and share recommendations for books to read, based on shared reading history. All of the examples used in this framework use this fictional product as a basis.

Using the guidelines as-is

The guidelines on this static site can be used as-is as a reference for your own work. If you feel something is incorrect or could be better, please let me know or submit a PR on GitHub!