Grammarly Dynamic Writing Style Guides

Style Guide is a brand new Grammarly feature that allows companies to define their writing principles to make sure that employees writing stays on-brand across different channels.

Problem

Many companies have certain rules of communication. It contains a list of terms, banned words and tone recommendations. But making sure employees actually adhere to those guidelines is complicated. It's very easy to forget what is the right word to use "client" or "customer", misspell important client name or sound too playful when brand tone should be more formal.

Goal

We want to give an easy and scalable way for companies to help their employees adhere to writing guidelines. Allow them to find deviations from rules and help to fix their writing and stay on-brand.

Creating Style Guide Feature

As the first step of the process, our Product Marketing team conducted a series of business user surveys. I analyzed the results and find out that a lot of managers struggled to make sure that all streams of their company communication stay consistent. We realized that it may be a good opportunity to create a guideline feature for enterprise users to help them stay on-brand. To check our hypothesis we created a simple landing page to check if the value proposition resonates with our customers.

From the results of the test, we saw high interest from landing page visitors and decided to proceed with building the Style Guide feature.

I started formalizing the job our product was going to accomplish based on user feedback.

Idea was to allow business users to set custom rules about the proper use of brand language that will be displayed as alerts cards for their team members wherever they write.

As the next step, I worked in collaboration with Ivan Yip on suggestions design that employees will see as they type and also interface for defining style guide rules. I researched existing companies' guides to figure out which rule creating flows would fit their needs the most.

Result

After the initial launch, we saw a lot of promising feedback from users that loved the feature. We hope it allows to expand Grammarly Business in the future as it provides a unique value proposition for teams that interested in improving their writing quality.