One of the assignments of the UX Writing Academy was to analyze a user journey and redesign the onboarding flow for Pace — a calorie-counting and activity-tracking mobile app.

There were already some screens designed, so I started with analyzing them. I needed to consider following requirements:

Conversation mining is a simple method that allows you to learn about target audience vocabulary. I looked at multiple App Store reviews and blog posts. Aside from the wording, I got some cool ideas for app features!

  

I started with some hand-drawn sketches and protocopy to come up with different possible approaches to solving the problem:

In the next step, I combined the user journey map with more mature low-fidelity wireframes. The user journey map helped me determine what the app should tell the user, and what the user needs to tell the app (what data should the app collect). This step also helped me organise and prioritise the functionalities in the flow.

  

For the style guide, I used a very simple approach: I imagined the app as a real person and started with listing its characteristics. Then, I grouped them to create product principles. Based on that, I defined the principles' meaning and listed the writing rules:

Methods: cloze tests, highlighter testing

Copy Docs are a way of organising microcopy in a way that is easy to understand for team members. They can be super simple and contain only the final copy and the rationale:

Sometimes Copy Docs are more complex and contain the logic of the components as well. This is a very helpful approach to explaining the content-driven logic to other team members:

The most important part of the process was creating the user journey diagram, and mapping out what the app should communicate to users at each step to help them achieve their goals. Based on that, I created a content-driven onboarding flow.