Case study:
UX writing for Atlassian Community
Across a range of bespoke user interface (UI) views and out-of-the-box UI views from the third-party community platform, I crafted high-quality UI content.
What was the problem?
The new Atlassian Community site had a mix of completely new UI views with new content and UI views powered by a third-party community platform that had poorly written UI text.
All of this needed to reflect the Atlassian brand and tone of voice and help users successfully browse and contribute to the new online community.
Who was involved?
DESIGN TEAM
UX designer/manager
UX designer
John Collins (content designer)
PROJECT TEAM
Software developer
Software developer
Marketing program manager
How was the problem solved?
I provided UX writing through an evolving combination of Confluence pages/comments, whiteboard discussions, co-design sessions in Sketch, editing UI strings in code, using third-party platform functionality, UI string audits, and manual QA testing.
What was the outcome of this project?
Atlassian Community launched with high-quality UI content that served user needs and aligned with Atlassian voice and tone.
After launch, refined UI content based on ongoing discovery and user feedback.
Competencies demonstrated
Continuous improvement
Worked with developers to maximize our ability to customize the UI text from the third-party platform.
Audited UI strings files and manually clicked around site to trigger different scenarios to quality check the UI text.
Made numerous rounds of edits.
Acknowledged and acted on feedback during development and after launch when some UI text updates weren’t serving users well.
Building
networks
Iterated with designers and developers over the best process for making UI text changes.
Reached out to new team members to spar UI text and to get help with writing some UI text.
Driving for
results
Took ownership of UI text quality and went beyond what anyone else was considering.
Benchmarked parts of the Atlassian Community experience against the experience of other online communities powered by the same third-party platform.
Influencing
Built a case for developers to provide me with capability to customize UI text from the third-party platform.
Partnered with marketing for writing some UI text that had more marketing flare than just functional purpose.
User focus
Obsessed over finding and improving all the out-of-the-box UI strings.
Responded to post-launch feedback by continued iterations on strings.
Worked with developers to make sure UI strings would be localization friendly.
Teamwork
Worked closely with the other members of the design team.
Built relationships and trust with developers.
Brought stakeholders into design discussions as the community team was staffed.