Hello, so I’m taking up the daily UX writing challenge. It’s day 1 and I want to give it a good first impression.
Scenario: A traveler is in an airport waiting for the last leg of a flight home when their flight gets abruptly canceled due to bad weather.
Challenge: Write a message from the airline app notifying them of the cancellation and what they need to do next.
Headline: 45 characters
Body: 175 characters max
Button(s): 25 characters max
When someone is using your product, and the product fails to deliver an expected outcome—cancelled flights, late delivery of a package or a restaurant cancelling your order—then that's an issue can turn that user’s life upside down.
When something like that happens, the user will want to know about it (and want to know what to do about it) fast.
It's also incumbent upon you, the UX writer delivering this bad news, to soften the blow a bit while still conveying a clear message. There's very little tolerance for ambiguity here.
The problem? More often than not, the features in an app that let you take care of something like this are limited at best and downright useless at worst.
Here’s a hypothetical way to approach a scenario where a user expects an outcome of "having a reservation on a flight" but in reality, the flight has been cancelled:
An ideal message where the app does everything:
