Create a human voice for a robot car at Waymo

What my team and I did to build a consistent, human voice and tone for Waymo:

• Created an official word list to help eliminate operational jargon and acronyms from our internal documentation and training (ex: say "driver" not "vehicle operator")
• Published a 20 page style guide for tech writers, trainers, and support agents themselves to use for their writing
• Built and led multiple trainings to make better writers out of customer support agents, trainers, and others across the company and its partners

See the examples of a writing training and more information about the style guide below.

Training

My team and I created and taught the course above. It was one of the first writing trainings for customer support agents at Waymo.

Waymo U style guide

Snapshot above is from the Waymo U style guide.

The style guide was put together thoughtfully using:

• Waymo marketing's own brand guidelines
• Google's internal UX writing style principles
• AP style
• Mailchimp's UX style guide
• Accessibility writing tips (ex: things like adding alt text to all images, avoiding writing to visuals like "Click the blue button," etc.)
• Localization writing tips (ex: avoiding colloquialisms that might not translate)

Make it easy to request, write, and publish content through Waymo U

I built lightweight, repeatable processes, workflows, and templates to make it easy for my small team to churn out content requests quickly (over 300 in one year with a team of 3).

What I did:

• Built a content request form using Monday.com to collect requests easily that stakeholders actually use every day
• Created rundown templates for stakeholders to fill out when requesting new content that asked for just enough information for us to get started without being too burdensome for them to fill out
• Defined a process map for all content projects to help train new tech writers and set expectations for their work; this was also shared with stakeholders to make it more clear why content requests take time and effort (i.e. we can't write this for you in one day if it needs legal review)
• Created a project tracker with some automations in Monday.com to track work sprints; this allowed us to easily pull efficiency metrics for the first time (how much was requested, how much was written, what types of content, what teams were involved, how quickly it was completed)
• Set up a two week sprint structure for my team's work when the amount of work was becoming overwhelming and hard to track; increased productivity and improved team morale

Look below for examples of a process map and a template that I made.