UX Guidelines

Purpose

Provides the Countable team with guidelines for when our work intersects with the UX domain.

Scope

This document currently sets guidelines for usability, content writing, publishing on social media, and SEO.

Usability

Company-wide usability standards and guidelines, so we maintain a minimum bar for our work and clients’ work.

Guidelines

  • Body text should be 16px or larger.
  • The body text font stack should fall back to Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif.

User Interfaces

We should curate our own knowledge here. For now visit: Good UI

Content Writing

This document standardizes the voice and presentation of Countable’s content writing. This may include:

  • Blog posts
  • Proposal writing
  • Copy writing on countable.ca
  • Copy writing on various Countable sites and products

Formal Standards

To ensure professional presentation, all writing under Countable’s name must:

  • Be checked for grammar and spelling (if you are unsure of your grammar, please have another team member proofread)
  • Appropriately credit any work/images/references other than our own
  • When referencing Countable, use the domain countable.ca. And, use our simple logo glyph where possible.

Countable’s Voice

Countable’s priority is to be professional, approachable, and above all, USEFUL to our reader. This means we:

  • Use clear and direct language
  • Avoid use of industry jargon and acronyms; if they’re used, provide definitions
  • Fact check any assertions made, particuarly technical ones - it’s important we maintain a reputation of being experts in our field
  • Avoid spammy messaging trying to coerce or trick our reader into buying one of our products - our products should speak for themselves
  • Where appropriate, we can mention our products and their usefulness

Blog Writing

When writing blog posts for countable.ca or one of our other sites, please remember to:

  • Consider the site’s user(s) and write “to” them: Who are they? What do they do? What are their needs? How can we help them?
  • Blog posts are ideally between 200-500 words
  • The more pictures, the better - if you can illustrate your points or advice with an image/screenshot, please do. Credit others’ work accordingly (in most cases, a link to their site or where you found the image will suffice)
  • A blog’s voice can be friendly and conversational, so feel free to add some (classy) humour, rhetorical questions, anecdotal experience, etc. You can include your own voice as well as the overall tone of Countable (see above).

Resources for blog writing

Finally

If you have any questions, or good resources/tutorials, please contact julie@countable.ca

Please send your first few articles to julie@countable.ca for review before posting.

Countable’s Social Media Posting Policy

The following covers what is and isn’t okay to post, and who should be posting.

Purpose of Social Media Posting

  • Inspiration, for now, to inspire our team mates and clients with our work, and work we admire
  • Lead generation via followers

Attribution

  • In order to avoid confusion between our work and others’, all photos and designs not owned by us or in the public domain must be properly attributed to the original owner
  • This credit can be posted in the image caption

Subjects

  • Work samples
  • Work that inspires us (be clear which is which)
  • Team photos
  • Industry-related memes and inspirational photos

Instagram Aesthetic

  • Our feed is tiled in an alternating dark & light image layout
  • Wherever possible, use colours close to Countable’s brand colours (blues, blue-greens, black and white)

Regarding Clients’ Privacy

  • No posting screenshots of code
  • Some clients’ work is private, so always check with Clark before posting it
  • Anything already public should be ok

Note: For the time being, anyone other than Julie who wishes to post on Countable’s instagram should save their post as a draft for Julie’s review before posting, to ensure the above policy has been followed.

SEO Guidelines

Page Titles

Should be 60 chars or so. Include keywords “real estate prices” or “housing market” Include the current Year and/or Month. Include a quantity in the title. Include a convenience or quality word from “quick, simple, today, X minutes, now, free, automatic, ultimate, complete, definitive, study, step-by-step”. Include an emotional word “Amazing. Remarkable. Magic. Extraordinary.” Use parentheses in your title “( in 2018 )” “( Ultimate Guide )”.

Meta Descriptions

Should be 200 chars or so. Include foreshadowing, specific numbers, call to action, reasons the user would visit your page. Include key differentiator, what sets you a apart. Use a curiousity gap

From 2018 SEO Checklist

Google has about 200 “ranking factors”. Top ones include:

  1. number of similar words “on-page” in titles, url, headings, and body text, to the search term.
  2. how many links on the internet point back to your site/page
  3. how many people click your page in Google (CTR) by writing a good meta description, and how long they stay on your page (dwell time/engagement)

#3 is new in 2018, and more emphasized. the other #1 and #2 are old from original pagerank algorithm

Having things render only in React/Vue/Riot tags (not on server side render) is still a disadvantage. It’s also important to review WMT, ahrefs and Google App engine for clues on what works.