4 microcopies that needed a makeover
There’s the good. But there’s also the bad, and the ugly. It’s as important to learn as much from good practices as from, ehm, not-so-good examples. I think it’s a great counterbalance and, why not, a cure of humility to all of us. No one, not even the big tech companies, are error proof.
As part of my UX Writing journey I started following ig account @ betterux, the evil twin of ig @ uxwriting_zone. They curate alerts, error messages, CTAs, forms, etc. that are prone to misleading, confusion, use of dark patterns or other bad practices.
So I started to play around with a few of them and tried to improve them. There are five of them. Ready?
But, before we get into that…
Disclaimer: I’m not a native English speaker. I’m just someone who happens to have a very solid romance with the language of Shakespeare and The Beatles. If you find any typo mistake, feel free to drop me a comment. Thank you!
1. The Authentication Error
- We should avoid jargon as much as possible. So instead of authentication, which sounds kind of robot-ish, I specified that the error was either in the email or password. We should not give much clue of which one because this could make it easier to the hackers, to break into someone’s account.
- I also stated in the tittle what was all of this about, and got rid of the “sorry”. Seriously, enough with the “ooops”, “sorry” and so on…
2. The “What do you want from me” buttons
This one I didn’t found on betterux but in the Microcopy & UX Writing Facebook group, and was quite discussed. This is a classic example of not knowing what happens next when you click one button or the another.
3. The Permission
Quite cryptic message, and rude I would say. I’ve fixed it by warming a bit the tone and explaining a bit more “why” we need this permission. Although, I need more information about what this feature is about to do, so a more richful context would help to make it more useful.
4. The Flight
- Starting with the readability, red on red is just... No. So I fixed that.
- I rewrote the sentence in a more conversational tone. Dismissed the “sorry” and also got rid of the all captions, which in internet language makes you sound as you are yelling.
What do you think of these proposals? Is there anything that you would have done different? Let me know in the comments.
