Connect with shoppers, anywhere.
The Ask.
Google, the ubiquitous search engine giant, hosted its merchant advertising solutions on a product site called Google for Retail and needed new features added.
The Challenge.
The site, geared toward connecting businesses large and small with their customers, has gone through several rounds of updates and found its current messaging weighed down by dry, technical jargon.
My Solution.
As the lead copywriter on the project, I shaped the narrative strategy for this platform as it grew. I wrote banners, modules, and complete product pages — leading the approach to how these solutions were seen by the world.
In one memorable sprint, I remember our creative director looking at a page and saying “this doesn’t make sense.” No one wanted to take ownership for a product that we’d all found to be a difficult nut to crack, until I stepped up and said “why don’t we try rebuilding this page from the ground up, story-first?”
I led our whole team, clients included, through a storytelling workshop, in which I asked everyone what it felt like to be a first-time user for this product. I asked the major questions I thought a user would have; then, we brainstormed answers to those questions. I converted this exercise into a page outline that used those answers as positioning statements for each module, and then worked with my clients to refine those statements into final copy, adding additional messaging and imagery as needed.
The page was entirely different from how it had looked when we kicked off design work — when, at the time, we’d built our modules from a brief that included the client’s preferred language. But no one could argue that the page wasn’t clearer. From then on, any time we kicked off a new design exercise, we started by working through the product narrative and user journeys first.
View the work:
