Staffbase is a leading employee communications platform to streamline internal communication to employees. As Staffbase has scaled to serve over 13 million employees across 2,000+ companies around the world, the product has become more complex and product text has only become more important.

However, without a centralized workflow, maintaining consistency and tracking changes across their growing volume of in-product content was a big challenge. Content creation and review was decentralized, with designers producing UI content on the fly, leading to inconsistencies and inefficiencies. That, combined with a global user base across multiple languages, including English, German, and Georgian, meant that the Staffbase team desperately needed to figure out how to build a scalable system around their product text.

Before Ditto

Before implementing Ditto, Staffbase's had a few big challenges when it came to managing product text:

• Complexity and Scale: With Staffbase still in its growth stage, the design team had grown to 30 designers while the UX writing team was only made up of 1 writer and 1 localization manager. This imbalance meant that content often became an afterthought in design, and any edits slowed development timelines.
• Lack of Centralization: There was no centralized system for managing or reusing UI content. Designers and writers had to sift through old files and comment threads to find relevant information, which led to major inconsistencies, fragmented reviews, and communication issues.
• Localization Challenges: Previously, designers had to duplicate every screen in Figma multiple times for each new language, making any translations labor-intensive and error-prone. As Erik, Localization Manager at Staffbase, expressed, “Making 1:1 correlation of translated text across pages was mind-numbingly hard.”

”The trigger for knowing we needed Ditto was when I realized we had nowhere to put all this stuff so I could retrieve it. We needed one central place to manage all these words.” — Bruce, Senior UX Writer

Workflow with Ditto

With Ditto, Staffbase has transformed its content workflow:

How UX Writers use Ditto:

• One Central Text Library: Bruce and Erik maintain a centralized, searchable database of product text within Ditto. By memorializing text from previous projects, the small UX writing team is able to empower other stakeholders to work with the right text from the start of a project, and reduce the burden of reviews. And with Ditto’s Figma plugin, the writers can make necessary text changes that automatically sync with the designers’ files without interrupting their flow.

• Variants for Translations: Erik, Localization Manager, uses Ditto's variant feature to manage global translations, storing translations right alongside their English base text. Erik can now write translations once and preserve them within Ditto, significantly reducing manual effort and making it easy to preview translations from one Figma design.

As Bruce, Senior UX Writer, explains, “With Ditto, we can now actually create content standards. Now that we have so many examples, we can actually find and share those with the team.”

How Designers use Ditto:

• Research & Inspiration: During the early days of a new design sprint, designers use Ditto to research existing approved content and draw inspiration. This helps designers get a head start and move faster without having to waste their time writing every word from scratch.
• Reviews: Ditto has reinvented the review process at Staffbase. Ditto’s Figma plug-in keeps the designers’ Figma files up-to-date with the latest version of content, while the web app provides a single running log of feedback. In the final design phase, the team uses Ditto to mark text ready for review, propose edits, and ensure consistency in wording and translations. This keeps team members aligned and makes it easy to finalize and hand off the right words.

Lastly, Ditto has significantly improved cross-team collaboration. Designers can now handle some aspects of content creation and review independently, reducing the load on the limited content team. By building a centralized system in Ditto, the team is able to maintain consistency and take a unified approach to product text, keeping them nimble and effective even as their team and their product scales.

Benefits of Using Ditto

Time Savings:

• Working faster: Ditto has helped the team save significant time during the research phase by allowing designers to search existing content and get a head start. Clarissa, designer at Staffbase, has been able to save hours each week by having Ditto handle the right words so she can focus on what she does best and just design.
• Streamlined creation and review: Ditto has transformed team communication, reducing the need for tedious back-and-forths over what’s been reviewed and what is actually final. Designers and writers can now easily work together, and the lean UX writing team can stay involved throughout the design process without losing track of too many competing priorities.
• Simplified translation management: Managing translations with Ditto variants has streamlined the process of managing multilingual content. Now, the team can translate text once and reuse it forever, reducing time and manual effort to create and manage translations, all while reviewing each translation in context of their Figma designs.

Consistency and Quality:

• Language and style: Ditto made it easier for the growing Staffbase team to maintain consistent language and style across the product, like a content design system. The established standards make it easy for designers to self-serve, and new team members can quickly get up to speed.
• Reduced Errors: The structured workflow and centralized system have allowed the fast-moving Staffbase team to iterate, review, get consensus, and ship faster while also reducing errors that get pushed to users.

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Ditto has transformed how Staffbase centralizes, reviews, and ships text for their global product suite, leading to improved efficiency, consistency, and collaboration across teams. The team’s new workflow not only enhances the quality of UX content but also saves time and reduces errors, and helps the Staffbase team feel confident that they now have the infrastructure to scale with their rapid growth and increasingly complex product.