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.
Every piece of text communicates something to your users. It guides them, informs them, and sometimes even persuades them. Good product text can make the difference between a seamless user experience and a frustrating one. But as your product grows, so does the amount of text, and managing it all can become a challenge.
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.
Without a system in place, managing product text can quickly spiral out of control and inconsistencies, mistakes, and outdated messages start to crop up. A systematic approach helps you avoid these issues, ensuring that your text is always accurate, consistent, and up-to-date.
So, what actually needs to be part of your a system for managing product text? It typically includes a few key elements:
1. A library of searchable, reusable text components: This is where all your product text lives. A centralized repository ensures that everyone on your team is working with the same words, reducing the risk of inconsistencies and outdated content.
In Ditto, you can create components for text, similar to the way you create design components or front-end components in engineering. So all that text that’s repeated across your product – disclaimers, placeholders, error states, or CTAs – can now exist in one place that’s documented and available for reuse.
2. Built-in Review Tools: Your system should facilitate collaboration across teams. Whether it's product managers, designers, or developers, everyone should be able to access and contribute to the product text in a controlled and organized way.
Ditto’s built-in review functionality makes it easy to get opinions from anyone who has input on text — from product, to design, to leadership, to security and compliance. Everyone has their own unique perspective on text, and that should be a value-add, not a time waster. Instead of chasing stakeholders across docs, Slack threads, email chains, and time-consuming meetings, just invite them to Ditto and get their feedback alongside an always-on activity log.
3. Integrations across every stage of product development: Just like your product designs, text doesn’t just live in one place. From drafting, to design, to review, to implementation, your system needs to integrate text changes across the entire workflow so you everyone on the team is working from the most up-to-date decisions.
Ditto’s open API makes it easy to work alongside your developers to ship copy changes without the painful horse-trading just to get your tickets prioritized. By connecting Ditto with your codebase, you can ensure the right text is always getting shipped to production, without extra manual work needed by engineers anytime you want to ship a change.
4. Iteration and A/B testing support: The best product text systems give you the tools you need to iterate on and test your product text with ease. We often hear teams tell us that they know copy has huge ROI, but it never feels “worth it” to change because of how hard and cumbersome it is to do — they have to find an engineer, get it on a sprint, track down where it lives in the codebase, copy/paste, QA, etc.
With Ditto, any time there’s a change, even post-ship, you can go directly to that text item, make an edit, push that change across Figma mockups and directly into development.
Ditto’s variant capabilities make it simpler to actually test out different versions of your text – whether it’s A/B testing versions, or personalizing text to your different user personas, or managing translations – you can track and manage all of those variations in Ditto, and ship those out just as easily.
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Building a system around your product text doesn’t happen overnight, but starting with these key elements will set you on the right path. Begin by centralizing your text in a single repository, then implement version control to keep track of changes. From there, establish consistent naming conventions and ensure that your system supports collaboration and localization.
When you have a system in place, your text becomes more consistent and it reduces confusion for users. You’ll save time and effort by avoiding duplication and manual updates. And when it’s time to expand into new markets, your localization process will be smoother and more efficient.
Building a system around your product text is essential for creating a scalable, efficient, and user-friendly product. By centralizing your text, implementing version control, using consistent naming conventions, and supporting collaboration and localization, you’ll be able to manage your product text with ease. In the end, this systematic approach will not only improve your workflow but also enhance the overall user experience of your product.
