Taming the beast that’s legacy copy
I’m still not sure if it’s fortune or misfortune for a content designer if you find yourself staring up a colossal mountain of legacy copy at work.
Actually, scratch that. It’s no mountain.
It’s a dark, scary, bottomless abyss. I think this analogy fits legacy copy better because nobody can really know what to expect when they take a peek, dip a toe, or just straight up dive in.
As an early content designer in any organization, you’re bound to be tasked with this challenge almost as soon as you start your job there. So if you ever find yourself looking over the precipice into the abyss, I hope these tips will help you land on your feet when you take that leap into it.
Ask ‘why?’ — a LOT
This should undoubtedly be your starting point. I mean, when somebody asks you to jump into a bottomless pit, you don’t just jump, do you? You try to find out why, at the very least. And this is very important when you’re looking to audit the legacy copy on your products for a few reasons.
First, you need to know if it is even necessary and will have a positive impact on the product. Finding out where this sudden interest in improving the existing copy is coming from, would help you gauge the validity behind the request and strategise your work better.
Also, you need to know you’ll have the time and the freedom to work on it and see it through, otherwise, it will be a huge waste of your time and energy. Because this isn’t something that you start on a Monday and end on a Friday. When done right, it should take you the better part of a year at the very least. And a lot can change in that time period.
If the management wants the copy improved, but they’re not allowing any design changes at the moment, (because they’re working on a new ‘design system’ or whatever) then that’s a red flag. You just need to nip it in the bud right then and there. Because copy changes aren’t just copy changes, they are design changes and one can’t be improved without improving the other.
Remember to zoom out
Similarly, if there’s a roadmap, ( a solid one) and if this roadmap has a plan laid out to improve most of the features and flows currently on the product, then too, your ‘copy fixes’ would be futile because everything will change in a bit anyway. So just add your copy audit to this roadmap and get in early on these feature revamps to improve the copy more holistically.
As a content designer, it’s your job (debatably), to make sure that you zoom out from time to time, get a bird’s eye view of things within your organization or the product space you’re working on, and to find out how your work will affect other aspects of the product and its lifeycle. The ripple effects of copy changes are more often far greater than the eyes can see.
Understand your audience
Now that you’re convinced that this needs to be done, and that it won’t have any adverse effects on the product, your next focus should be on your target audience. You need to truly understand them before you start rewriting the words on the product that they’re using and will (hopefully) continue to use.
Collaborate with the research team. Take their help to interview your users, learn more about their experiences on the product, and understand their ups and downs while using it. Dive deeper with empathy maps for each flow, and make sure you take into account their emotional state before putting pen to paper. Make sure you have a rock solid reason for each change you make.
Identify tangible needs
And I mean your users’ needs, not the product teams’ or that of the upper management. Feel free to shut those down. Hard.
The research you do to understand the people you’re writing for, should also enlighten you about how the copy is working for, with, and against them. Identify these scenarios, both the good ones and the bad, and drill down on those to find out what’s working and what’s not.
Take exhaustive notes on the above and build your case for the edits you’d propose and the ones you’d not. This research will be the bedrock upon which you’ll build your entire Church of content design, not just this one legacy copy audit project.
Lay down the foundation for good practices
This is a little off course but a great side project to knock off along with the main one. That’s because the two are intertwined and will set you up for a relatively comfortable future.
Now that you have the understanding of your audience, you know what works with them and what doesn’t, and you have strong evidence to back your claims, don’t stop there. Build on that.
Use these learnings to lay the ground work for how you think your product should be talking to your users and why. Build a style guide, come up with a glossary of terms, add copy guidelines and templates into the design system, or climb up the tallest tower and scream your Gospel from there, it doesn’t matter. But, do it. You’ll thank yourself later.
Break it down into chunks
Or in other words, climb down the abyss instead of diving into it.
Redoing the copy on a product, at any scale, could quickly become overwhelming and get out of hands. Also, it’s easy to lose yourself in the darkness down there.
Be smart about it. Break it down into manageable chunks that you can work on, get the team to implement your suggestions, test them to see how they sit with the users and then move on to tackling the next chunk. This gives you a safety line should you lose your footing, shows your teams and stakeholders the kind of work you’re putting in, and helps them to envision for themselves, the new vision that you’re working towards.
Don’t hesitate one bit to toot your horns about this work. Because it is hard laborious work, it’s very important, most likely groundbreaking for the product, and totally deserving of all the accolades you’ll never receive.
In summary, this is how you go about your mammoth copy audit to fix or update legacy copy:
- Question everything that comes your way
- Never lose sight of the big picture
- Understand who you’re writing for
- Identify what they want from your product and from you
- Lay down the ground work for posterity, and
- Don’t bite off more than you can chew
That’s it! Hope these will come in handy for your some day.
Anything else from your experiences that you’ve found to be helpful? I’d love to hear about your process and how it’s worked out for you. Feel free to let me know in the comments. Thanks for reading!
