Hornblower: Product Copy Rewrite

My Role

Content strategy, UX writing, copywriting, brand strategy

The Problem

I was tasked with creating a better user experience for our customers who are looking at our products. The previous site didn’t meet our brand guidelines.

Primary Goals:

Give them necessary information faster
Create best practices for product copy to distribute across company

The Solution

I worked alongside our dev and UX team to ensure we were meeting our customer’s needs, while also making it easy for products to be updated on the backend. For this reason, we created five categories: Overview, Includes, Schedule, Where to Meet, Dress Code

From there, I created best practices for each category. These included a order hierarchy for the “includes” section and the decision for everything that was available “for purchase” to be listed last. I wrote generalized directions for every port, noting whether free or paid parking was available. A big win, for the “shorter is better” crowd was the dress code section. Before, our dress code copy was a bit outdated. One port requested women wear silk pants and strappy sandals. Now, it’s simply, casual, semi-formal, or formal.

Below you’ll find our old product copy page, best practice guidelines, and our new product page.

*Best practice guidelines for port product managers*

Results

Ease of content management for port product managers
Fewer customer support inquiries
Better wayfinding for customers

Next Steps

With our new voice guidelines in place, there’s a lot more room for the overview section to be more fun. We also want to make that section shorter. While the design isn’t finalized, we have started mocking up copy.