What’s in a name?

The second week of work at Abstract, I was asked to serve on the naming committee and have a hand in changing the name of our new product. The working name, “Integrations” was difficult to remember or spell. I pitched the name “Notebooks” because the future product included both writing and design tool integrations and a notebook is a commonality between artists and writers. We conducted a user study and the name was well received. This name opens up the ability to create features on a theme with proposals for “pages”, “folios”, and “libraries” in play.


How do we write in our product?

From the beginning, I knew creating an in-product style guide would be important and rallying the education and marketing writers around an agreed set of basic guidelines would be even more important. How do we write in our product? is part of a larger collaborative effort to use our own product to document and review content changes and to brainstorm writing challenges.


Voice and Tone

With a new product come the need for an updated voice and tone guide. We brought in Anna Pickard to conduct a voice and tone workshop for primary content creators at Abstract, after which, I served at the product representative to collaborate on our voice and tone guide.


Other projects within Abstract

Creating content for Notebooks billing screens

Updating Branches billing screens

Onboarding flow v1 and v2

Presentation mode project (in development)

Sign-up flow

Optional reviewer project (in QA)

Empty states project

Notification content audit

Slack integration

Building Insights feature

Insights pies toasts

Curator of #WordNerds Slack channel

Observer for all in-product user studies

Mentor for new designers

Developing an accessibility team (in process)

Product and Design Jam - presenter “Defining space” and participant

Content preference testing

Content education Slack spot series (in process)

People and Teams feature

Design history feature

Decisions feature

Focus View feature

Billing redesign