Reimagining Eventbrite’s Tone of Voice

Summary

I drove a project to update Eventbrite’s tone of voice guidelines, so that content folks across the company could align on how we talk to our users. I facilitated and led 20+ content stakeholders through workshops, presented findings and tone updates to key content and product stakeholders, and collaborated with Marketing and Brand teams to refine existing tones.

The Problem

Eventbrite’s current tone of voice was inconsistent, and confusing to users. We owed them a better, more cohesive experience.

After a year at the company, I noticed in my day-to-day work that different content teams across the company wrote differently from everyone else. In-product strings would mostly come across straightforward and brief, while external blog articles and marketing landing pages got to be showy and ostentatious; while our Help Center articles were clear, helpful, and to-the-point.

I wanted to see if this was documented anywhere, and reached out to our Brand and Marketing teams for more. They presented me with what Eventbrite’s current tones should be: adventurous, purposeful, original, and welcoming. But how did these tones translate to the words we used to talk to our users? To find out more, I conducted some quick research…and soon realized that there were gaps in our tone guidelines, which had led to a disjointed experience across the Eventbrite user journey.

The problem then was: How could we bring more unity and consistency to our content?

The Research

an audit and research also showed that we were inconsistent—and that we could do better.

I did a brief audit of external and internal content, and also scavenged our research channels for our latest creator and consumer survey data, as well as any competitive analyses that could give me leads on brand perception. The results were clear: we needed better alignment on our tone.

The Solution

A tone of voice spectrum to illustrate frequency and tone in context

A consistent tone of voice would strengthen our brand cohesiveness and the ability for customers to recognize Eventbrite in the market. So, the solution was to update our tone of voice guidelines, while also considering a tone of voice spectrum in my back pocket as a way to organize and illustrate the ways Eventbrite’s tone changed in context.

Other added benefits to an updated tone of voice included:

• Improved trust with our users

• Competitive differentiation

• It would breaks through the noise and makes us more than just a “logo on a ticket”

• It’s good UX

• Would help us onboard new writers more quickly (and consistently)

• Reduce feedback loops during design reviews

How I Got There (“The Werk”)

figjam workshop sessions helped me understand our team’s needs, and how our tone could serve us and our users.

What I did:

• Audited the Eventbrite universe looking for gaps in our tones and missed opportunities

• Held a series of cross-functional workshops with representatives from all content areas to determine gaps

• Leveraged existing Consumer and Creator research about brand perception to uncover user needs

• Used empathy maps and archetypes to identify ways to make the tones more relatable for users

• Analyzed tone standards from all over the web

• Interviewed 20+ content folks to understand what they would need from new tone guidelines

The Results

six updated tones that took from their originals, but were now grounded in research and collaboration.

Essentially, I found that our current tones aren’t serving us well enough.

• They felt more aspirational than actionable.

• We needed more clarity and specific guidance on how to use them.

• Most people weren’t even referencing (or even considering) them when writing new content.

• We were unsure if we’re speaking the right language for our audience.

• We were coming across too stiff and corporate, with not enough emotional appeal.

And so I updated our new tone of voice—and designed it in a spectrum to indicate frequency as a way to illustrate how often the tone was used, as well as examples to show how it would show up in context.

Say hello to Eventbrite’s new tones: Informative, Helpful, Welcoming, Encouraging, Playful, and Celebratory.

The Impact

how do we know if this tone update was successful?

Tracking how successful a new tone guide actually is tricky. For starters, I:

• Tracked consistency across our top five surfaces: Homepage, Listings, Newsletter, App, and SEO

• Tracked user perceptions through a follow-up to Eventbrite’s “Shifting Consumer Perceptions Benchmark” Study

• Tracked writer adoption and satisfaction with the guidelines

I also added a tone research question to UserTesting for another project of mine to test out our new tone spectrum, and to see if our new tones actually resonated with our users. The hypothesis was that users would check off “Informative” and “Helpful.” 4 of 8 participants selected both “Informative” and “Helpful.” However, of the remaining 4 who didn’t select just these two:

• 3 participants added “Playful”

• 1 participant added “Celebratory”

No one selected Vague, Authoritative, or Discouraging. (YAY! 🎉) This could mean tones can “blend” with other tones that are adjacent to it—and that we might actually be injecting more play into our content than we originally thought!

Since the new tone guide, I’ve also:

Added the new tone guidance to our company’s Design System and Content Standards Hub. That way it’ll be nice and easy for everyone to find the information they need, when they need it. We’re not done, though. Our tones will be continually improved upon and further defined to give the most clear guidance to create effective content for our users.

Worked on a word list to further our consistency initiative. Aligning on vocabulary is critical in providing the more cohesive experience to our users. We’ve started a word list in Marmalade, and plan to host some cross-functional workshops to align across the business.

Helped implement new content processes for our content lifecycle. We’ve started this work in-product only, and are looking for ways to align with other content orgs so that we can have an even clearer, more holistic content strategy. It’ll also help ensure our content is fresh, helpful, and aligned with user and business needs.

The Retro

What i could’ve done better, and thoughts on how i could expand this work.

Though I presented our updated tone guidance to Product pillar leads, presenting this to e-staff and getting their buy-in or presenting at an All Hands could’ve driven more awareness about tones and prompting greater discussions around how we talk to our users. Another struggle with updating tones, voice, and other strategic content work: getting people to learn about it—and actually USE IT—are key!!

Some other ways I could’ve driven more awareness about these tones could’ve been…

• Partnering with User Research to define audiences/archetypes more granularly, and how to use the right language based on age / geo / demographics

• Further defining personalization to contextualize their experience

• Exploring nuances between user journeys

• Partnering with our SEO team to ensure language is consistent with users’ expectations

• Asking to add our updated tones into the onboarding doc for all new employees. This will help everyone at Eventbrite speak the same language from day one.

Other questions to consider: How does imagery, typography, and color also affect tone? 🎨 How might Content teams partner with Brand and Design Systems teams to also show a spectrum of brand expression, and how content and design appear in different contexts?