Overview

At Maze, our values are at the core of everything we do. We’re proud to say that two of those values also drive our identity and expression:

Connecting design, content, principles, and strategy to create something truly amazing.

Creating a strong and unique identity requires teamwork. Each piece must connect seamlessly to create a coherent, empowering, clear, and inclusive whole. The value resides in the connection and not in the individual parts.

With this vision, we’ve built our Experience Language, Ariane, to create a coherent omnichannel experience.

Related content

Identity—our voice

Our voice is what makes Maze recognizable. The personality, essence, and approach we take when we create experiences, whether designing an app feature, crafting a blog piece, or creating a social media post. We’re informal, transparent, and don’t mind sharing our playful side from time to time.

It isn’t hard to find the voice. It just takes hundreds of hours of deliberate practice.
— Chelsea Larson, A voiceful writer

Voice can be challenging and requires practice to imbue our design and writing with these characteristics.

Our guiding principles

Coherent

Everything we create is with intention. To ensure that our voice remains coherent and scalable, we have purposeful guidelines that are solid, clear, and speak to every context.

Flexibility and openness are crucial for creativity and innovation. However, the magic happens when we set aside personal preferences and embrace our constraints to maximize our shared identity.

Empowering

Delight doesn’t come from adding more colors, icons, animations, or emojis to what we do. Instead, it comes from going above and beyond exceeding people’s expectations.

We want people to make the most of what Maze has to offer, not just for us—for them. It’s all about creating an exceptional experience that leaves people happy, satisfied, and fulfilled.

Clear

We connect the dots for people. We communicate complex ideas and flows in a clear, easy-to-understand, actionable, and sometimes fun way. Only experts can make what’s difficult look easy, and that’s our job.

Inclusive

We create for everyone, regardless of their abilities, needs, or aspirations. We let go of our biases and embrace permanent, temporary, or situational disabilities where anyone can have an equally exceptional experience. Accessibility is essential for some but useful for everyone.

Content

Here's a pint-sized version of the style guide to relieve your word thirst.

• Write in 🇺🇸 US English.
• Use plain language. Write in plain English and be aware of cultural differences, cognitive abilities, reading level, or background knowledge in your writing. If unsure, just ask!
• Use the active voice. It’s more direct, clear, and stronger than the passive voice.

• Think positive ☀️ Write using positive language rather than negative language.
• We love the Oxford comma: for lists, options, and groups of three.
• Contract when possible: 'that is' > 'that's,' 'they are' > 'they're'. It sounds more human and less rigid—especially when speaking with customers.
• Avoid brackets if possible (they make the information within them seem unimportant): Instead, ask yourself whether the text in brackets really needs to be there or not.
• Feel free to use exclamation points and emojis but with moderation. No need to shout!!!!
• Always check and respect people’s preferred pronouns: If in doubt, use ‘they,’ ‘them,’ and ‘their’ as a singular pronoun, or just ask the person involved.
• Acro-what-now? If you’re unsure of an acronym, you’ll probably find it in our Acronym Dictionary (and if not, let us know).

Further reading

Design

Design is all about balance and purpose. Our ultimate goal is to provide a seamless experience that aligns with people’s expectations and the context. Here’s how to make the most of our design voice.

Color

Using color to emphasize essential elements.

Our semantic App color expression provides purpose and meaning to color.

Color is a powerful tool for directing people’s attention, highlighting important information, and evoking emotions. Our eyes naturally gravitate towards it. We use it strategically to guide people and enhance their experience.

Having small touches of color makes it more colorful than having the whole thing in color.
— Dieter Rams

Further reading

Contrast

Using contrast to emphasize essential elements.

Our App expression uses contrast in three levels, regardless of the color, using perceived luminance.

Adding contrast to our designs attracts attention and creates focal points. This is especially important when there is a lot of information to convey. We use contrast wisely to establish a visual hierarchy.

Size

Using size to emphasize essential elements.

Our font size scales create a visual hierarchy.

When it comes to establishing a hierarchy, size is critical. More prominent elements naturally draw more attention and are seen as more important. We use predefined size sets to ensure balance and coherence in each context and align with the hierarchy and information density.

For text, we apply various sizes to highlight important subjects, headlines, and quotes depending on the context. This approach helps us establish a clear hierarchy and assign semantic roles to each style.

Further reading

Space

Using space to emphasize essential elements.

Leveraging the laws of proximity, we establish relationships between elements more effectively.

Proper use of white space has a dramatic impact on design. It guides the viewer to focus on what matters, allows us to establish relationships between elements, and creates balance. Designs that poorly use white space look messy and cluttered. We use it effectively and systematically to achieve a polished and professional look.

Further reading

Strategic areas

Supporting our customer along the entire journey.

Context is essential, and we support our customers along the entire journey. These are the key strategic focus areas where we'll apply our identity and expressions:

Product

The only platform that makes product discovery continuous, fitting every team's schedule, experience, and needs. Validate product decisions and collect feedback across the entire product development cycle.

App

Education and support

Content marketing

The content marketing team’s mission is to create content to help non-researchers become research practitioners, establish Maze as the thought leader in product research, and drive growth through content.

Website

Podcast

Resources

Amazing time

Expression—our tone

Applying tone is like increasing or decreasing the volume of the expression.

If the voice is the recognizable, consistent identity, think of tone as how the voice changes depending on the context. It still sounds like Maze, but we may have made a mistake, so we’re more apologetic or excited about a new feature we’re launching and want to shout it from the rooftops. Meet people where they are by asking: how might our words and the overall experience make them feel, and when and how should we design and write to acknowledge this?

We define different expressive sets depending on the context and what people need at that particular moment.