UX Copy Style Guide: Giving MongoDB's Product Copy a Shared Voice
Role
Project Lead
Company
MongoDB
Categories
Copywriting
Timeline
Q1-Q2 2025
Overview
Goals
Enhance UX consistency, clarity, and accessibility by developing MongoDB's first UX copywriting style guide.
Establish a greater focus on copy throughout the design process.
Publish guidance for grammatical standards, voice and tone, best practices for user-centered language, and specific design patterns to better support designers and researchers.
Core Team
One Principal Technologist and me
Problem
Business Context
MongoDB's products are highly technical, and the people writing UX copy (product designers) had no shared reference for how to write it. That meant every flow risked introducing its own conventions and terminology. This undermined the clarity of our products and trust from our users.
Constraints
No existing standard to build from. MongoDB had no existing UX copy guide to work off of. There was an existing Documentation and Marketing Style Guide. We used these as reference, but the overlap was minimal as they were built for different audiences and use cases.
Limited resourcing. This was a lean effort: one DRI (me), a design technologist, and a couple of supporting collaborators.
Needed to be usable, not overwhelming. As we were adding an additional step to the design process, we needed to make sure that we provided the right amount of guidance. Designers needed to be able to find the information they needed quickly without becoming overwhelmed.
Foundational Research
Industry Audit
A structured audit of 10+ industry UX style guides. The best examples were short, ~5-minute reads per page, organized by use cases rather than abstract principles.
Internal Focus Groups
A focus group with Documentation writers to get their feedback on the current copy in product and how it aligns (or doesn't) with their technical writing. I also gathered best practices for creating an updating a style guide.
A focus group with product designers to understand their primary pain points when writing UX copy.
Reviews
Design Systems
2 representative from the design systems team helped write and pressure-test the guidelines for blind spots from a systems perspective. Design Systems owned formatting the final guide for publication on mongodb.design.
Research
The UX Research director was brought in specifically to shape what "quality and credibility" should mean for UX copy, establishing this guide as a baseline the team could measure against, not just a style preference document.
Documentation
The Documentation Director was kept informed throughout, since the guide deliberately borrowed and diverged from the existing Docs Style Guide.
Solution: Voice and tone
Human: approachable, empathetic, accessible, and inclusive
Use a conversational and human tone. Avoid overly formal language. Every interaction should feel like it’s coming from a helpful companion.
Straightforward: confident, knowledgeable, clear, and concise
Get straight to the point, communicate with clarity and precision about even the most complex of subjects. Use short, concise sentence structures to increase readability.
Positive: encouraging, supportive, and motivating
Focus on the user’s end goals. Celebrate their successes and reinforce their efforts.
Provide ways to proactively address issues in error messaging. Show empathy for their challenges.
Solution: Grammar and mechanics
Align on one glossary
As both the Marketing and Documentation team had their own technical glossary, we worked with both teams to consolidate them into one that could be shared company-wide.
Concrete, prescriptive UI-element guidance
We specify simple terminology to default to, i.e. "Save" vs "Commit" and have specific rules per component making it easy to navigate the guide during reviews.
Process
Included a copy review as a formal step in the design process. We also identified contacts in the documentation team to help with any technical questions designers may have.
impact
Process Changes
This guide turned copy into an explicit part of the design process, adding a copy review to new project lifecycle and including a the style guide as part of new designer onboarding.
It also helped to drive alignment between the Marketing and Documentation teams, by cross-linking the style guides and establishing a review every 6 months to ensure they remain consistent.
reflection
What's Next
Each 6 months we review the style guide and add items that are needed (i.e. conversational guidelines for the AI). We need to continually advocate for teams to pay attention to copy as it was not prioritized for so long. Adding a formal copy review to the design process has helped significantly.
The principal technologist also built out an internal tool that automates copy reviews, flagging any copy that doesn't align with the guidelines and suggesting updates.