TAÍNO CONFERENCE 2025
UX WRITING AND CONTENT DEVELOPMENT
The Reencuentro Taíno Conference highlights the evolution of the Taíno language, featuring linguists, artists, musicians, spiritual leaders, and community members. It includes keynote talks, children’s programs, music, and more, with participation from Taínos, indigenous allies, and experts with the support of UNESCO in celebrating the International Decade of Indigenous Languages.
BACKGROUND
My team collaborated with cross-functional teams (PM, Design, Research, and Development) in an Agile environment to help Casa Areyto develop a 3D immersive digital platform and website content focused specifically on user engagement, usability, and accessibility, which will introduce Taino heritage at the virtual Taino Conference.
ROLE
UX Writer (Co-lead) |
Content Strategy, Content Structure, Content Guidelines, Capacity Management, Weekly Crits.
DURATION
Sep - Oct 2024
TEAM
Michelle: UX Writing Lead
Me: Co-lead
Keila, Dana, Ashleigh, Aaron: Apprentices
The Process
01
Member recruitment.
Finding 3-4 suitable candidates for the UX Writing Apprentice position.
02
Client meetings & feedback collection & integration.
Working with clients every Monday to update the info about the working process.
03
Team meetings with cross-functional teams.
Working with developers, designers, project managers, researchers, marketers, product strategies to create a collaborative workflow to achieve the final goals.
04
Working with team members to create the UX Writing style guides.
Developing the UX Writing style guides that were not deeply explored in the previous phase and aligning them with the project roadmap.
05
Based on the new UX Writing style guides, focus on the elements that clients want to improve.
Elements discussed include: Inclusivity, Voice & Tone, Accessibility, and Grammar & Formatting.
06
Retrospectives meetings for working through achievements, challenges, and backlogs.
Every Friday, teams have time to raise support issues and collect questions to send to clients for the following week.
The goal
How might we incorporate client feedback from Phase 1 to improve the content and effectively communicate create a strong impact for both Taino and non-Taino users during their experience on the 3D immersive digital platform and website?
Research + Analysis
The problem
According to the client’s feedback from Phase 1, the content strategies convey a more inspiring and casual concept. However, the event will attract many professionals, including academic researchers, historians, descendants of Taíno people, cultural and heritage organizations, and educators. The previous Taíno event in August 2023 had notable accomplishments including: -
Over 15 presentations and workshops
Visitors from 7 countries and 11 U.S. states
Approximately 800 total attendees
Based on that, the client wants the content approach to be more formal with the focus also on education, particularly to engage Taíno descendant teenagers (15+), offering an engaging and creative way to learn in the protection of their culture and language.
These are the key points we primarily want to focus on based on the client's updates and feedback:
Embracing each island's unique features and specialties in more detail.
Seeking a balance between a respectful tone and a more casual, accessible tone to cater to diverse audiences.
Target audiences include individuals interested in Taino culture, as well as official groups such as government agencies and educators.
Appreciating the voice and tone of the UNESCO website, which could serve as a reference for this project.
After numerous thorough meetings and discussions, we finally decided on the UX writing style guides. We chose to closely follow the Mailchimp, Intuit, Material Design and Adobe writing systems. In alignment with the client's request to use UNESCO writing guidelines, we also incorporated Taíno writing resources into these systems. The final list of resources is as follows:
We then continued working on a competitive analysis of the style guides to gain a deeper understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of each resource we selected above.
Based on the analysis, we started to develope a comprehensive content strategy, incorporating elements such as voice and tone, accessibility, translation, grammar, and formatting as following:
Inclusivity: Consistent style for Indigenous people, considering users' emotions and concerns, avoiding bias and stereotypes, using specialized language appropriately, ensuring clarity for the target audience, and writing respectfully about disabilities and trauma.
Voice & Tone: A spectrum graphic for voice and tone, reflecting values and personality, using an anti-racist tone, appropriate emoji usage, emphasizing the importance of the guide, and maintaining formal language when needed.
Accessibility: Consider literacy levels, adhere to accessibility standards, use appropriate content mediums, and prioritize simple, clear language for better understanding.
Grammar: Guidelines for punctuation, formatting, and language usage, including dos and don’ts (e.g. tenses, abbreviation, etc.), along with examples and rules for grammar and spelling.
Formatting: Present key information first, establish clear formatting styles, and ensure content usability with the UXD team by choosing appropriate font size, typeface, and high contrast between text and background.
TAKEAWAYS
Communication is always one of the essential parts if you want to create a smooth workflow
✨ Learn to lead a project and educate team members who may not be familiar with design and research processes, particularly when collaborating with cross-functional teams.
✨ Exit my comfort zone as the product requirements were not fully defined and were still being developed. At times, proactively asking questions and seeking support from the PM team to clarify tasks was definitely the right approach.
✨ Communication is key when it comes to explaining the value of my team's work. I learned that there are times when I need to step up and advocate for joining meetings, not just with my team, but with other teams (Development, Research, Design, PM) as well. This allows me to capture key points from other teams and foster a better collaborative environment.
FINAL RESULTS