You're racing toward launch. The designs look perfect. Then someone asks, "What about the content?"—a question that far too often gets asked too late in the process. Kyle Alexander, Sr. Product Designer at Credit Karma, breaks down how we can all introduce better content design principles, even if our processes are less than perfect.

In Emma's last article for Ditto, she spoke about what content-first design is, and how it can truly work in a product-driven world where designers don’t get ownership over full experiences. In this follow-up article, Emma breaks down how her design team puts content-first design into practice at eBay. 

When designing a page, many designers start drawing out the layout of pages using placeholder copy, like lorem ipsum, to signal what content might go there. But this can often mean you’re not really considering what users actually need from the page. Emma Aldington, Sr. Content Designer at eBay, explains how her team takes a content-first approach to product design, to put the users at the center.

Product teams are constantly looking for ways to improve the user experience of the products we’re building. Clear, consistent product copy isn’t a “nice to have”, or a quick checkbox before you ship. It can have serious impact on the user experience, and with the right system to iterate and improve your product copy, you can unlock some serious ROI.

Systems are everywhere in product teams, helping us build better products, faster. It's how we bring consistency, speed, and efficiency to product development. For example, when designers create a button, they don’t start from scratch each time—they lean on design systems to ensure consistency with font, size, and color. The question is: Why should text be any different?

Our friends over at UX Content Collective released a new report outlining the biggest challenges facing UX content experts — straight from the mouths of content experts themselves. So we're breaking down some of the biggest struggles facing UX writers and content designers today — and how Ditto can help you overcome them.

Product copy—the crucial words that describe your product, guide users, and tell your brand’s story—is often simultaneously important to everyone, and owned by no one. Getting all these opinions might sound like a recipe for chaos. But with the right system, this collaboration can lead to seriously better outcomes for your business.

When you're building a product, the words you use are just as important as the code you write or the design you create. Your product text—everything from button labels to error messages—is a crucial part of the user experience. So how do you manage all that text in a way that’s scalable, consistent, and efficient? The answer lies in building a system around your product text.

Creating great product text is a team effort. It involves input from product managers, marketers, engineers, designers, and even legal and compliance teams. At first glance, getting all these opinions might sound like a recipe for chaos. But with the right system, this collaboration can lead to seriously better outcomes for your business. This month, we're digging into some of Ditto’s built-in collaboration features that you can start using today to build a seamless review process.

From new AI capabilities, to universal search, to plugin speed improvements, the team’s been busy this month. Check out what we've been building for you over at Ditto.

Product text is one of the most under-leveraged parts of your user’s experience, but it doesn’t have to be. By building an intentional, systemized approach to the words in your product, you can ship better product text that supports, educates, and delights your users. If you want to start writing better product content, check out these 8 things you can start doing today to help you get there.

Whether you want to manage all of your translations in Ditto or integrate with a TMS like Lokalise or Phrase, Ditto helps for a seamless localization process.

Ditto has helped to transform how Staffbase centralizes, reviews, and ships text for their global product suite, leading to improved efficiency, consistency, and collaboration across teams.

In Q1, the team set out to do a large redesign of Ditto, with a lot of inputs across teams: from product, to engineering, to marketing, to leadership, everyone had an opinion to share on the refreshed product copy. So how did the team manage this big, cross-functional UX redesign? With Ditto, of course!

Uber Carshare used Ditto to localize and manage copy for 2 new international markets, and built an entirely new way to collaborate between content design and engineering teams.

Ditto has a new UI! Read about the changes to Ditto's welcome experience, navigation, developer tools, and more. Take advantage of these new tools to help your whole team move faster in Ditto, and find the most valuable actions with the click of a button.

Blip’s team of 1500+ employees (over 60 of which are designers) work together on a product that spans a global customer base: over 32 countries in 3 different languages. After a year of using Ditto, the Blip team found that Ditto allowed them to write, proofread, and translate 48% faster compared to their previous process.

Today, we’re excited to introduce webhooks to our developer tooling! Webhooks allow developers to get notified about actions in Ditto in real-time, allowing them to build workflows that automatically get triggered by changes in Ditto.

Zero, a mobile health app with over 1M monthly active members, used Ditto to launch and scale their daily coaching feature — driving a 43% increase in user app sessions. With Ditto, the team is now able to ship content updates daily, rather than bi-weekly or quarterly.

Today, we’ve released our new developer docs. 🎉 In addition to expanded functionality, our new dev docs tackle explaining both how Ditto works in the big picture and how to solve specific use-cases with concrete examples.

In this guest post, the Lokalise team dives into tips on how to streamline localization efforts across design and content for a seamless and efficient process.

Last week, we released v4.0.0 of our CLI, with a focus on flexibility. In this blog post, we showcase two key CLI features new to this version — source-specific config flags and component folder-specific string files — and how you can utilize them:

In the complex world of front-end development, there are many challenges in managing text via the code. We examine "unsafe text", provide a solution using Ditto, and outline its benefits and integration steps.

There are lots of stages that copy goes through — and review is needed at every single one. Today, we’ll be exploring how your team can build a scalable workflow that helps get the right text to the right place, faster.

We're excited to announce support for importing spreadsheets into Ditto! Content and metadata imported from CSV files will get added to Ditto so that it can be worked on and synced alongside all other content.

It can often be intimidating to start building a content design system from scratch. After working with hundreds of teams to get up and running, we’ve organized a guide on what we’ve seen work best for teams looking to building with text components.

Our team developed a VS Code extension that automates the replacement of hardcoded strings with Ditto component IDs. We've released it in beta so that other teams can try it as well.

Own Up, a mortgage fintech company with over 10,000 customers, uses Ditto to manage text across writers, designers, and developers — saving them 6500+ hours per year.

Today, we’re excited to be announcing formal support for content templates in Ditto! With templates, teams can formalize common content patterns and speed up the writing of content and the design process as a whole.

Today, we're excited to announce the launch of two new variable types in Ditto: lists and maps! We hope this helps teams interpolate more structured content for dynamic strings.

As a product that helps other teams build their products, it’s always been a top priority to ensure that your data is stored safely and securely. Today, we’re proud to make this commitment to security official and announce that Ditto has successfully achieved SOC 2 certification!

Today, we’re excited to announce a feature that takes things one step further in closing the gap between copy and design: Design View in the web app! 🥳

We’re excited to introduce Ditto’s Slack integration, which allows teams to connect projects and your component library directly to channels in your Slack workspace to receive notifications regarding Ditto activity.

From beginner to intermediate to advanced, Jonathon Colman, who leads content design at Hubspot, shares tips and resources to transition into the field without spending money.

We’re excited to introduce the ability to configure how IDs for strings get generated in your Ditto workspace — including the ability to specify casing, delimiters, regexes, and automatic update rules.

We sat down with Yael Ben-David, author of The Business of UX Writing, to discuss how teams can utilize the words in their product to maximize their own business outcomes, as well as a framework for that process.

Today, we’re excited to announce Ditto’s new-and-improved integration with Figma branching! Teams in Ditto that are using Figma branching will now have access to version control that’s built for copy, enabling teams of any size — whether 2 or 200 — to maintain a centralized source of copy truth.

In 2022, we got to see customers truly embed Ditto into their workflows at scale, saving time for everyone from writers to designers to developers. We rounded up a few of our metrics from 2022 that capture just what that usage looks like.

The practice of content design has led to everything from shifts in company culture to the emergence of communities of thousands dedicated to the discipline. We discuss all of these topics with Kristina Halvorson, who has seen the content design space take shape over the past 15 years as the CEO of Brain Traffic.

We sat down to chat with Sophie Tahran, Director of Content Design at Condé Nast, about everything from advocating for the value of content design to how she sees the field evolving over the next few years.

Manually maintaining string files can be time-intensive and error-prone, especially when handling formats across multiple platforms. With Ditto's developer integrations, teams can manage their strings in multiple formats — web, Android, and iOS — without ever manually creating or editing a string file.

Ditto now supports Grammarly natively — in both our web app and our Figma plugin — to correct misspellings, grammar mistakes, and improve writing clarity.

Today, we’re rolling out rich text support — meaning you can now bold, underline, and italicize any text stored in Ditto. In this blog post, we dive under-the-hood on how we built this feature.

The process of managing product text is often difficult across so many stakeholders and sources — despite its importance in the role of building product. In this post, we look forward to what it means to systemize text and build infrastructure for text.

Stash, an investing and banking app with more than 2 million members, uses Ditto to manage all of the strings in their product — maintaining text across both design files and web, iOS, and Android platforms. 

Jordan of UX Tools joins us to share his own experiences working with text as a designer and 5 steps to building a content system as a team.

Today, we're excited to launch pluralization support in Ditto, to enable teams to manage plurals more easily and ensure users always see the right copy.

Today, we're excited to launch Variables in Ditto, which enables teams to easily interpolate dynamic values and links into product text.

From syncing edits to existing strings to componentizing text and integrating with localization tools, we wanted to share a quick guide for developers on getting started with Ditto.

We're excited to launch Component Suggestions, which intelligently suggest Ditto components to create and reuse based on text in your projects.

One of the most common questions we get asked by teams getting started is how others are using, organizing, and thinking about their components. We did a deep dive into how teams are currently building their component libraries in Ditto.

We recently launched keyboard shortcuts to make selecting multiple pieces of text in Ditto simpler and faster. In this deep-dive, we share a look at what it took to build and ship this feature.

Today, we're excited to launch Variants in Ditto, which allow teams to write and preview text variations for frames in their projects.

Learn the secret behind how we develop and debug Figma plugins in real-time, and how you can too.

Ditto's component suggestions automatically surfaces components from your library most similar to text in a design file.

Since launching our plugin in January 2020, it's been used by thousands of people to manage text in their mockups. In this post, we share our approach to building Ditto's Figma plugin and do a deep dive into how it works under-the-hood. 

We're excited to launch our API and developer integrations, which allow engineers to fetch up-to-date copy directly into development. This means a single source of truth for product text, from design all the way to production.

Here's how companies today are collaborating on product copy from design to production.

Today, we're launching a major revamp of the component library to help teams build out their content systems in Ditto.

Reflecting on the past 12 months building Ditto, one thing stands out — community.

Invite stakeholders as comment-only users in Ditto to streamline your copy review process.

Almost every aspect of product today exists in and is thought of as a system. At Ditto, we think text should also be thought of (and implemented!) as a system.

Product copy, or the text found on user interfaces, is the most under-leveraged part of product development today. Here are a few reasons why.