Overview
I recently helped the Developer Portal team on a short engagement to improve the copy on their homepage. They liked the content work so much that they brought me in again for work within the product!
The team needed help reimagining the microcopy that describes our API catalog for devs.
The ask
Developers can tap into Fannie Mae’s API catalog to build out their own applications.
Our product owner received user feedback that our API catalog is hard to navigate and understand. I was asked to simplify our API catalog page microcopy.
My role
• UX writer
• UX content strategist
• UX content strategist
I worked with a product marketing manager, a product owner, and a UX designer on this project.
Tools I used
• Word: to audit all page elements and strings
• Excel: to edit microcopy and share with project stakeholders
• Sketch: to put my edits to see how they worked with the design
• Teams: to communicate with the project team
• Excel: to edit microcopy and share with project stakeholders
• Sketch: to put my edits to see how they worked with the design
• Teams: to communicate with the project team
My process
The APIs page has a wealth of descriptions of each API in a card style. The descriptions tend to be long and have an accordion-style expand component, showing the full description.
• I took a tally of all the current descriptions: what is the heart of each description that we need to preserve?
• Tweaked each description to shorten it significantly so users can read the entire description on a card
• Compared descriptions of our APIs with how we refer to it throughout the entire experience to ensure it’s consistent
• Put my microcopy edits into Sketch and reviewed high-fidelity prototypes with our UX designer to make sure it fit with her updated card style
• Worked with a product marketing manager and Legal to get approvals
• Shipped final copy to the UX designer
• Tweaked each description to shorten it significantly so users can read the entire description on a card
• Compared descriptions of our APIs with how we refer to it throughout the entire experience to ensure it’s consistent
• Put my microcopy edits into Sketch and reviewed high-fidelity prototypes with our UX designer to make sure it fit with her updated card style
• Worked with a product marketing manager and Legal to get approvals
• Shipped final copy to the UX designer
The outcome
My edits are in production! They're coming soon to the Developer Portal later this year.
• Updated H1
• Updated subheadings
• Updated card descriptions
• New action-oriented CTA links for each card
• Updated subheadings
• Updated card descriptions
• New action-oriented CTA links for each card
Where I could make a bigger impact
My engagements with this team are generally fairly short (usually included in a specific sprint here and there). If I could be included in the core team or even be embedded, I think I could make a more significant impact with Dev Portal content.
• I could audit ALL content across all pages to see how refer to things to make sure we’re speaking about aspects of the site consistently.
• I want to lean on data for making these changes, not just content best practices. I’d love to learn where visitors spend the most or least amount of time, where they came from, and their last visited page.
• I want to do testing: a lot of changes feel ad hoc based on a small group’s feedback who is internal to Fannie Mae. Can we bring in outside devs in for testing to get feedback instead? We are not the user base.