Continuing our series on the Defra content community projects, senior content designer Louisa Mallon describes how her team planned and created a Defra style guide.
Last week Graeme Claridge, Head of Content at Defra, wrote a blog post about content community projects. One of these projects – and the one that I volunteered to lead – was to create a Defra-specific style guide and define a process for keeping it up to date.
Why style matters
An important part of a content designer’s job is to make sure the language in the content we create is clear, consistent and current. The government design principle ‘Be consistent, not uniform’ outlines the importance of this.
You’ll find most government content designers have the GOV.UK style guide bookmarked because we spend a lot of time in there! The guide outlines style, spelling and grammar conventions for all content published on GOV.UK.
Identifying the problem
But what happens when we need consistency and agreement on Defra-specific terms, language or conventions? There’s no guidance on farming, flood and food terms in the GOV.UK style guide, so we risk using these inconsistently across the content we create.
We have a style council at Defra, where content designers discuss terms not covered in the GOV.UK style guide and agree a consistent approach. But we did not have a way of sharing the terms as decisions were made, and not everyone in the team was even aware the style council existed. So, the style guide content project was born.
But who would our style guide be for? Would it only be for people in the Defra content community? Would our policy colleagues find it useful? Should we make it publicly available, like the content folk did with the Home Office style guide and the NHS England style guide?
We decided to focus on creating a minimum viable product (MVP) for the Defra content community. This would give us something tangible, which we could share with others in Defra later on to gauge their interest.
Learning from others
We spoke to content designers across government who had been through the same process as us to get an insight into their style guides and related processes.
We also asked content designers in Defra to share any ‘informal’ style guides they had created, even if these were just a few terms agreed between them and a subject matter expert (SME).
Some Defra content designers in our flood team had done just this, and with their help we created a template for our guide. We added some entries from recent style council meetings and arranged user research sessions to ‘show the thing’ to our users: other Defra content designers.
We used the time with our users to check our assumptions of what our style guide should do and include. The overwhelming feedback was our guide should:
- record what is appropriate and best – or likely to be best – for our users, not necessarily what is considered ‘right’
- recommend alternatives if it says we should avoid a term or approach
- include examples if this helps users to understand when and how to use something
- feature a short introduction explaining how to use the style guide, how to submit entries for consideration and a link to the GDS style guide for anything not included
- not contradict the GOV.UK style guide
We got mixed feedback on whether:
- we should only include things unique to Defra content, even if non-Defra content not in the GOV.UK style guide would help our content designers to do their jobs
- the guide should just feature short entries – the term or approach and an example – or include how the decision was made and any evidence of why it’s best for users
- SMEs and user researchers should be involved in decisions about entries
Armed with these insights, our project team took the first draft of the guide away to make some improvements and decisions.
Working with the style council
We’ve worked closely with a content designer from the style council throughout this project. This is to make sure there’s a smooth user journey, from someone submitting a term for consideration by the style council, through to it potentially appearing in the style guide.
For example, we’ve designed a triage process together to help the style council decide which submissions to prioritise at their meetings. This process will help to identify:
- submissions it’s critical we reach a consensus on, because their impact on users is particularly significant
- the most challenging submissions, such as those with varying opinions on the best approach
We also looked at how we can keep the style guide concise and easy to use. We wanted to balance the needs of those who favour simplicity with those who prefer more detail, such as the rationale behind decisions.
We created a Microsoft Planner board that integrates with the submission form, and which we’ll link to from the style guide. Those who want to see discussions about a term, or evidence, can find it one click away from the style guide.
What’s next
So, we have an MVP. Brilliant! We look forward to using it, testing it and thinking about whether we roll it out further in Defra.
But we can’t celebrate just yet. Hopefully something you’ve taken from this blog post is that the style guide and the style council must go hand in hand.
As a content community, we’ve just launched the next round of community projects, and I’m delighted one of them will focus on revamping the style council and getting more of our content community involved.
I’ve volunteered to represent the style guide project in this new project, so we have continuity. Keep your eyes open for a blog post about that project in the coming months.
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2 comments
Comment by Andrew posted on
Is the Defra Style guide published openly? I can imagine it would be useful for people trying to engage with Defra!
Comment by thomas posted on
Hello, thank you for your comment. We haven't published the style guide publicly yet, as it's still in the early stages of development. But it's certainly something we'll consider as the project progresses.