Qordoba

Pros

Twitter hired me in January 2019 to help scale their content practice. Here are some of the ways Qordoba is helping to do just that.

* Streamlined content authoring, revision, optimization, and publishing processes
* Improved content quality/consistency
* Tailored content experiences to user segments
* Streamlined localization processes
* Content preservation for legal/compliance purposes
* Simple inventories and audits, with instant content scoring
* Easier collaboration with stakeholders, most notably, engineering

Speaking of engineering, we all know it takes a lot of tedious dev time to put content into production. The Twitter Dev team is as excited as any team at Twitter about the efficiencies Qordoba offers. At Twitter, we’re using the Qordoba API to integrate Qordoba with our proprietary strings management platform. Content strategists can now write, score, revise, request feedback and approval, and select to complete a string, all within the platform. With a status of Complete, the Qordoba API then pushes the strings to our proprietary strings management platform, which in turn pushes strings to our production environments, slashing the amount of time engineers spend writing, updating, and wrangling the strings in the code.

Yay!

I’ve waited for Qordoba my whole career and I can’t recommend it highly enough. My DMs are open. Don't hesitate to message me if I can provide additional info.

Lisa Jennings Young
Twitter Design
@LJenningsYoung

Cons

The Figma plugin isn't yet available, but I know it's on the Qordoba roadmap. I look forward to implementing this when it's available to further streamline our workflow. No more copy/paste!

Pros

Qordoba is not a generic style guide. On top of standard spelling, grammar and usage checks, Qordoba lets us add the custom rules of our brands' particular style decisions, word choices, inclusivity guidance, etc. to fit our customer experience. And with ML it gets even more valuable over time.

It's flexible and scalable. You can use while writing anything in Google or go deep and integrate it with GitHub to check product UI text strings. It has an extended ecosystem of plug-ins into design apps and content translation. It's useful for our non-writers and expert pro's alike.

The support from Qordoba is super responsive. They act on suggestions and requests like partners who are invested in our success.

Cons

Qordoba does rely to on machine learning for some features. A strength in my view because it does allow that customization. As with any ML feature, you have some ramp up time teaching it what to do and what not do. This isn't at all particular to Qordoba, just something to prep the teams for. Qordoba made it easy for us to train, though, with options in the interface that's familiar, like traditional language checkers.

Pros

The customizability of the style guide and the power of the plug-in text editor (much better and more accurate than Grammarly) is worth the price of admission alone. It's so great to finally have a software that will allow you to create your own rules for editing copy and content across platforms without having to refer back to a physical document every time. Makes developing a brand voice and training others on brand voice MUCH easier.

Cons

The software UI is a little confusing at first, and it was difficult to figure out what exactly to do at first. It wasn't until I spoke with a customer support representative that I finally figured out what I needed to do to create rules and understand the difference between the Writing Style and Grammar tools. I don't think the software itself does a good enough job explaining how to use the more definitive features without getting on the phone with someone.