The Challenge
Gumtree’s UX content was inconsistent, confusing and prevented seamless user flows. In its 25 years, the business never had a single source of truth for teams on copy style, tone and grammar causing disparities across the entire platform for new and existing user journeys and landing pages.
The business was also entering a new phase with new product offerings and acquisitions to integrate making it a critical time to get a strong content strategy in place.
The Solution
Build a solid content strategy that provides efficiency and clarity for multiple departments.
Create a style guide that demonstrates how to form good UX copy with examples and lays down ground rules for style, grammar and terminology.
Provide guidance on best practice, including cheat sheets.
Design new content through active project work on new user journeys and reactive ad-hoc UI tweaks.
Work closely with the designers for education in action to give them more confidence and understanding of the habits that need to be instilled.
The Process
Having never had a formal style guide for the platform, it was imperative I spoke with Design, Product, Marketing and Trust & Safety to to understand their challenges, any business or vertical contradictions and essentially to cover as many bases as possible so the guide would serve as valuable asset in their ways of working.
I then presented competitor analysis, an audit and a proposal of what can be achieved according to my definition of what good looks like.
Set up weekly content calls with designers to understand context for new user flows and what’s next on the roadmap, with ongoing collaboration and discussion to achieve the most consistent and intuitive user experience.
The Result
Content Design Style Guide
A branded, comprehensive style guide that acts as a solid document for all departments to refer to when creating any new copy - UX, marketing and sales enablement.
The guide included Gumtree’s Content Design Principles, basic grammar and mechanics, tonal shifts dependent on journey and vertical, a defined glossary and many examples of good vs bad content for the various elements of UX copy.
New user flows
Designed consistent and concise content design for new user flows in Beta stage prioritising familiarity and small market differentiation for the brand.
Addition of trust messaging through new integrations and customer features on live listings and in-app messaging.
Defined Gumtree Content Strategy
Clear content strategy for the differentiated categories and markets with Gumtree. This allowed subtle tone changes according to vertical while keeping the experience consistent.
