Google · 2018–2019
Making a guarantee understandable
Explaining a service promise in concrete language and carrying it across product and support.
Explore the graphic - My role
- UX Writer & Content Strategist
- Period
- 2018–2019
- Project focus
- Trust · Content systems
At a glance
The work in context.
The challenge
A valuable service guarantee sounded like marketing language and left people unsure about claiming it.
My contribution
Rewrote the promise and created guidance with product, Operations and help-center partners.
The takeaway
Make the promise concrete and carry its meaning across every surface.
Inside the work
View larger Shared language for describing Google Guarantee.
The challenge
Google’s Local Services guarantee was a strong offer, but the phrase “Google’s money-back guarantee” could sound like marketing language. Some customers expected the claims process to be complicated.
The experience needed to explain the promise in terms that people could understand when deciding whether to book a service.
My role
I rewrote the tagline and created usage guidance for product, operations and help-center teams. I also worked with the Operations team to understand the questions they heard directly from customers.
State the promise directly
It began with the job the customer wanted completed and made clear who would pay if the promise was not met. The statement described the offer without asking people to interpret a marketing phrase.
The revised promise starts with the customer’s task and names who pays them back.
Make the explanation consistent
A tagline alone could not carry the entire experience. I created a style guide with examples for different contexts, so other teams could explain the guarantee consistently.
Shared examples show how to describe the guarantee across different contexts.
I also partnered with Operations to analyze their customer questions and anecdotes and improve the help-center explanation. Their work provided a perspective from people discussing the guarantee with customers every day.
The help-center page describes coverage, limits and how the guarantee is claimed.
What we learned
In qualitative testing, participants said they felt more confident ordering a service.
The broader lesson is to connect a promise to the person’s task, then keep that meaning consistent across the places where people encounter it.