Product copy has an absurdly high return on investment for your product’s usability and performance. As a designer, there are very few things I can do that will have as much impact as refining the words we use in our products.
Every word is a symbol, carrying meaning and associations and value that each user will unpack and understand in their own way. The right words, consistently, unlock better usability, easier onboarding, better retention, and delight.
Years ago I realized that as a designer I could reach for my team’s design system, component library, and UI patterns while working on UIs and workflows. But I didn’t have anything to reach for to help with the words in those designs. My team and I—designers, product managers, even developers—were making copy decisions on the fly. They were inconsistent, subjective, and we often had to re-learn the same lessons again and again.
That’s why, several years ago, I created the Product Language Framework: a comprehensive set of UX copywriting and style guidelines for use as a reference as-is, or as something a team could use as the basis for building their own style guide. I wanted to make it easy for any team to pick up, adjust to fit their product’s needs, and use as a living reference alongside the rest of their design system.
But even then, the style guide was still a separate artifact. Someone had to remember it was there, and seek it out. They had to think about all the rules and how those applied. Design systems and component libraries are right there in the design and development workflows: designers and developers apply the styles, pull in the components, and bridge design with development. You don’t have to remember to use them—they’re so deeply integrated into the tools people are already using.
The best style guide would be one that was there, integrated into the same workflow, showing up as you’re working, helping you to draft better copy at every step of the process.
This was never about needing better style guides. We needed integration. In the same way that our tools integrate design systems and component libraries, we needed a platform to bring product copy into the same end-to-end, systematic workflows we had for design and development. That’s when I discovered Ditto.
I joined Ditto last year as the team’s founding designer. Ditto’s vision for creating a single source of truth for product copy, from draft to deploy, resonated so strongly with how I think about copy as a designer.
Here was a platform built specifically to bring copy into the end to end process. Instead of living in separate artifacts and documents, spread across spreadsheets, Slack threads, and Figma comments, we could bring together and manage product copy all in one place—and maybe even style guides that live directly in the workflow, checking and improving product copy on the spot.
These last few months, we’ve been building just that: Ditto’s AI content system, integrated seamlessly into Ditto’s platform.
With style guides, teams create their own rules and examples directly in Ditto. Random LLMs don’t know your product copy, but you do. We’ve built in tons of flexibility—you can define rules in all kinds of ways, and even make them super specific by only applying them when text has a specific set of tags.
Magic edit brings those style guides directly into everyone’s workflow. Whether you’re a designer, developer, or writer, whenever you select text in Figma or the Ditto web app, magic edit automatically checks that text against the style guide. If it doesn’t align to the style guide, magic edit will suggest improvements on the spot.
And with magic draft (coming soon), you get a collaborative helper to write the “draft and a half” using your style guide and design context. Magic draft is integrated directly into Ditto’s platform, so it works right in Figma alongside your designs, as well as in Ditto’s web app, and your draft is tracked, reviewed, and approved with Ditto and kept in sync from design to development.
Product copy offers absurdly high ROI, and Ditto helps teams capture it. When style guides are integrated directly into the workflow, every team can get to better, more consistent, higher quality copy, that leads easier onboarding, better retention, and delight. All without the overhead of remembering rules or applying guidelines manually.
I am so excited for how Ditto’s AI content system will bring style guides into the end-to-end product workflow. It’s a core piece of creating a single source of truth for product copy—from draft to deploy—with the rest of Ditto 2.0.
Product copy offers absurdly high ROI, and Ditto helps teams capture it. When style guides are integrated directly into the workflow, every team can get to better, more consistent, higher quality copy, that leads easier onboarding, better retention, and delight.
As we continue to build out more capabilities into Ditto’s AI content system, we’re looking for design partners who’d like to get involved in our research and get early access to upcoming product features. Interested? Contact us at support@dittowords.com.
