{"id":8930,"date":"2017-10-27T15:00:22","date_gmt":"2017-10-27T14:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/intercom.com\/blog\/?p=8930"},"modified":"2025-01-03T13:01:48","modified_gmt":"2025-01-03T13:01:48","slug":"how-words-build-a-product","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/how-words-build-a-product\/","title":{"rendered":"Content strategy: How words build a product"},"content":{"rendered":"

We\u2019ve always cared about words at Intercom.<\/p>\n

This blog, our books<\/a> and our product marketing attest to that. But words within the product itself have followed a more evolutionary path.<\/p>\n

Decoding the product dialect<\/h2>\n

Words in a product evolve. They start with the people who first invent the product and name its parts. They change when new teammates bring in fresh influences. And they change again when they need to communicate to a new audience. All that change happens incrementally, word by word.<\/p>\n

It reminds me of the Ship of Theseus<\/a>, a 2,500-year-old thought experiment about the nature of identity. If you change every plank in a ship while it\u2019s on its journey, is it still the same ship when it returns?<\/p>\n

For products made of words and pixels, words are at least 50 percent of the ship.<\/p>\n

Words also guide what we build. We invent words to describe new features, and those choices are often an informal choice: a buzzword we use to give a loose shape to what we\u2019re building.
\nBut naming can be serious business. While there\u2019s an entire corner of the branding industry devoted to inventing product names, it\u2019s the names of individual elements \u2013 features and objects within a system \u2013 that can have unpredictable impact.<\/p>\n

For products made of words and pixels, words are at least 50 percent of the ship.<\/p>\n

Take the name \u201cpage\u201d. That name gave presence to \u201cplaces on the internet\u201d before we knew what those places would become. And we designed for that word and the metaphor it represented. We were so used to thinking of a page as a fixed thing that it took years to break free of that constraint.<\/p>\n

Names unconsciously influence how we think about what we design, and working titles can quickly become real titles with unrealized baggage.<\/p>\n

Shipping content strategy<\/h2>\n

Taking charge of language is a challenge for any company, but none more so than a growing startup. The evolution of a product dialect can cause silos to build up between teams who call things by different names, take features down detours when they\u2019re not well described, and worst of all, create inconsistencies in product UI. That\u2019s why you\u2019ll often find different names for the same thing in a product, or different tones of voice everywhere.<\/p>\n

At Intercom, content strategy has one core job: to evolve our dialect, at every level, from something organic to something intentional; to make our UI \u2013 and how we talk ourselves \u2013 consistent and coherent.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s how we\u2019ve begun to move things forward, plank by plank.<\/p>\n

Uncovering our building blocks<\/h2>\n

We’ve categorized every visible word in Intercom products. Objects, views, people, actions: these are all different parts of the system with different roles to play, and some are more essential and persistent than others.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Content strategy in action \u2013 how we classify our product’s terminology<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

The output of this is a taxonomy itself: a model that gives us consistency and control over how we describe each part of our product, and clarifies the relationships between those parts. And doing that work of classification and definition also produced our glossary of terms used in Intercom<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Mapping our mental models<\/h2>\n

Before we could define the words in the glossary, we needed to investigate where each one originated and how they were now used.<\/p>\n

Our differences aren\u2019t a failure, they\u2019re an asset \u2013 as long as we\u2019re aware of them.<\/p>\n

That meant interviewing people from every team in Intercom, taking note of the words they naturally use to describe the product and how they relate those words to each other \u2013 their internal sense of how our ship was built.<\/p>\n

The answer to this was that of any company: we\u2019re a team with different jobs and mindsets. People who see things visually, systematically, or linguistically have different ways of seeing the world and so use different words to describe it. What we found was, like all great research, totally unsurprising once we\u2019d discovered it: we each used the words that suited our own jobs and goals.<\/p>\n

Our differences aren\u2019t a failure, they\u2019re an asset \u2013 as long as we\u2019re aware of them, and they don\u2019t get in the way of us understanding each other, or our customers understanding us.<\/p>\n

Tracking our way to clear principles<\/h2>\n

Choosing names and writing UI content can feel temporal and subjective. To remove the vagaries of mood and subjectivity, it\u2019s good to write down some principles, even if you end up evolving them later. They shouldn\u2019t be a straitjacket – new principles will emerge, others will go into storage. But choosing principles relevant to right now is the best way to ensure your future creative choices are clear to yourself and everyone else.<\/p>\n

These are the three principles we started with:<\/p>\n