Infor Design
Project type
Design system guidelines
Client
Infor Global Solutions
Role
Editor, copywriter
Overview
Goals
Infor Design System is an online set of guidelines and resources meant to build consistency across Infor brand and product disciplines.
Challenges
As a brand-defining repository for Infor’s design standards, Infor Design System required input from a long list of stakeholders. Mediating these perspectives into a centralized message required ongoing collaboration and a deep understanding of Infor’s core design philosophies—as well as the intricacies of UX design system construction.
Role
My primary role was to provide editorial support and occasionally content design, collaborating with developers, product owners, project managers, and designers to ensure clear and consistent messaging.
Many teams, one story
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I began this project with limited knowledge of content design and UX principles, especially when compared with the experts who had built the foundational elements of Infor Design. By interviewing developers, UX designers, product owners, and other members of the team, I gained a firm grasp of UX design principles and design system elements. From high-level style guidelines like typography, hierarchy, color, and localization considerations, to more technical aspects like design tokens and component specs, I gained the ability to thoroughly edit guidelines without sacrificing the inside knowledge of our expert teams.
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This project involved curation as much as it involved copy editing. One deliverable in particular, a combined 30-page Component Guidelines document, was a compilation of drafted content from multiple stakeholders that was often redundant—and sometimes in direct contradiction with itself. After a weekend of style and clarity edits, I gathered all of the stakeholders on a call to develop a consensus, and by the end of the week, had developed a comprehensive overarching document that every team could agree on.
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To call this an editing project would be to miss the key task at hand: to reconcile and refine the key ideas that would come to define Infor’s design philosophy. Streamlining language and consolidating messaging into organized hierarchical layers didn’t just help with editing the documents; it was a key factor in driving team alignment as well.
Results
Component guidelines and foundational documents were delivered on time as an MVP.
While design systems are always evolving, key messaging elements from these early launch stages remains, with a majority of the content continuing to live within the design system.