Content style guide for Alipay’s international products

Project description

Ant Group (formerly Ant Financial) is a technology provider that strives to provide inclusive financial services to consumers and small businesses. It is an affiliate of Alibaba Group and owns China’s largest payment, Alipay. 

When I joined the Ant Group International Business Unit content team as the only native English speaker, I was tasked with establishing and advocating the content style guide.

As the style guide’s project owner, I was responsible for:

• Creating and maintaining style guides for marketing, UI, and technical content

• Conducting style guide and writing workshops

• Copyediting

Elements of the content style guide:

• Brand voice and tone

• Writing principles

• Grammar, punctuation, and formatting rules

Establishing a style guide was just the first step towards brand consistency. Implementing it in an environment where the operating language is in Mandarin proved to be a huge challenge.

Besides holding regular sharing sessions to get writers acquainted with the style guide, I made sure each rule was accompanied with concrete dos and don’ts examples. By beefing up the style guide with content patterns to follow and practical case studies to learn from, non-native writers could digest the guidelines better.

The style guide achieved these results within a year:

• Reduced editing time by 30%

• Injected more personality into UI content

• Empowered new writers to create on-brand content quickly and reduced training time

• Amplified the team’s professional influence

• Helped internal project stakeholders understand how content decisions are made