Summary: I created a sample style guide for any organization that wants to create documents for writers to use as reference**.** The style guide is based on a fictional app called JobPay.

About

JobPay is a fictional project management and payments app designed for freelancers and business owners to work together on small projects.

Here’s an overview of what the JobPay app does:

• Business owners use the app to pay freelancers and track the progress of hours worked (paying and tracking)
• Freelancers use the app to bill business owners and report progress on a paid project (billing and tracking)
• The app is “shared” by these two user types. Each of these users has a view of one side of the app: one uses it for billing and the other for paying.

Principles

These content principles will help make the user experience helpful and simple for our users.

When writing for users, you should:

1. Remove friction. Make sure user questions are answered with tooltips or microcopy.
2. We're using a confident/easy voice with varying tones depending on the situation. We can adjust the tone based on the audience, the situation at hand, and the primary goal for the user at that moment. For example, we would use a fun tone for onboarding, sign up, and success messages while we would use a serious tone for error messages and critical notifications.
3. Always place the most important information first, make sure texts are scannable, use bullet points, calls-to-action, and other prominent text or visual elements to quickly process the information presented and make their way through the task flow.
4. Use your user research findings to always write with empathy, and with the users in mind.

Voice & terminology

When we write for the JobPay app, we want to use a consistent voice and terms.

Voice characteristics

Here's how to sound like JobPay.