Write Ridiculously Helpful Error and Alert Messages
5 tips on how to write intuitive error and alert messages that will make your users say a silent “thank you.”
By Simone Ehrlich, Senior Content Strategist, Workday
The phrasing of helpful error and alert messages is a hot topic at Workday right now. We want to give the user the best possible experience, especially when they’re traveling down a path that may end in frustration.
Here are 5 tips for how Workday Design is approaching error and alert messages:
- Communicate in Context
- Be Concise Yet Clear
- Converse
- Be Consistent
- Compare
Unique? No. After all, Jakob Nielsen wrote in 2001 that not much had changed about creating effective error messages in 20 years, and that was 17 years ago. You do the math. However, sharing best practices, well-understood as they may be, is rarely a waste of energy.
The Purpose of Error and Alert Messages
Back up! Before we write for errors and alerts, what are they all about? Short answer: informing and redirecting. In other words, let the user know what’s going on and what they can do differently.
Errors, sometimes called hard stops, tell the user that something’s happened that interrupts the flow of what they are doing. Sometimes it’s due to an action the user has taken; sometimes it’s not.
Alerts, also called soft stops or warnings, give the user insight into what could happen. My bank balance is approaching the minimum required. Do I want to set up overdraft protection? Why yes, thank you.
We try to help the user recover in case of an error message. We may also give the user an option of taking an action in the case of an alert, but sometimes there’s no action to take.
Enough with the backstory. Here are some error message best practices.
Communicate in Context
Be specific to the user’s context, not generic, whenever possible.
- For an error, inform user what the problem is. What went wrong? Why?
- For an alert, let them know what the status is and how that may lead to an error. What could go wrong?
Next, tell the user how to recover. Specificity again! Put yourself in the user’s shoes, and think contextually. Was the user trying to do anything, or did the product or app just fail?
Try to guide the user. How can you redirect them so they can accomplish their goal? In the case of an alert, is there anything you can suggest that will help the user to prevent an error?
Be Concise, Yet Clear
Keep your phrasing brief, but easily understandable. It goes without saying, but x-nay on the argon-jay. (If you’re uninitiated into Pig Latin and missing out on the 3rd grade humor here, no jargon.)
In pursuit of humility and candor, we confess: not all UI (user interface) copy in Workday is perfect. Here’s an example that doesn’t tell the user what happened and mixes in a little jargon.
Bright side? Less than perfect examples provide opportunities for improvement and for learning. Sometimes we can learn more from imperfect ones than we can from stellar error message examples.
Clarity goes beyond avoiding jargon. The user should understand both what went wrong, and how to recover in a brief sentence, maximum 2.
Use your message hierarchy to help with brevity. If your error and alert messages always get a heading, use that real estate to deliver information. Then, you can shorten the rest of the text.
Rather than just saying “Error”, a header might say “Vacation Too Long.” Then the sentence below can tell the user how to recover — ”Make your vacation fewer than 3 months.” So sad. Must forgo backpacking in Chile.
Make your header and call to action count.
Let’s just acknowledge the tension between concision and clarity. That’s inevitable, like the tension between crunchy bread and lots of sauce in a sandwich. (The trick is to eat fast, at the proper angle so that the sauce drips onto the plate.)
Embrace that concision-clarity tension. It’s inevitable in all UX writing, not just errors and alerts. Sometimes you can be brief, and sometimes you’ll need a few more words to achieve clarity. Don’t sacrifice the user’s understanding. For more on concision and clarity in UX writing, check out how to do it like Google.
Converse
Be conversational and, while you’re at it, be kind. Ok, fine. That’s a K, but it sounds like a C. John Saito, UX Writer at Dropbox, suggests that writing should sound “like a human, like you’re a friend.”
Guide your user by talking to them — try saying aloud what you want the user to do, then write it down. Often at Workday when someone asks for help with UI writing, we’ll ask: How would you explain it if the user were right here? Great! Tell them like that. Here’s some helpful UI message text.
Courtesy matters. (See? Just gonna keep sneaking those C’s in on you. Can’t trust writers. Once we start alliterating, we can’t stop.)
Be nice to your user. You want them to feel comfortable and confident. In a conversation, face to face, you wouldn’t mock the user or make them feel incompetent.
Say your user enters $9,075 for a plane ticket. It’s better to bring the user’s attention to the limit, but politely: “Airfare exceeds $600.” Not: “Your boss will never approve anything over $600.”
Whether an error is the user’s fault or not, don’t blame them. Take the responsibility, or stay neutral.
One challenge we face here at Workday is our own configurability. Our customers can set up the parameters that may cause an error or alert. We want to avoid taking responsibility on behalf of the customer, so we stick to neutral — which leads to the next point.
Be Consistent
Write in your product’s voice and style. This gets a lot of buzz in the UX writing world.
How to put it into practice?
Check your UX content style guide for how to approach errors and alerts. If there isn’t one, see if another org at your company has one — like the marketing or documentation group. Or, consider developing a UX writing style guide. But that’s another article. Stay tuned!
See how messages appear in other features of your product. Nothing’s worse than having 2 messages written differently that mean the same thing. (Unless it’s having 1 message that shows up in 2 places and means different things.)
If you’re coming into a new org and see that the style of your error messages is all over the map or that they’re hard to understand, consider an inventory and later on an audit. Yes, yes, that’s another article, too.
How about humor, you ask? Again, consistent with your product’s voice and tone, you can experiment with humor. But be judicious about where you infuse humor. Depending on the task and the error thrown, your user may be in no mood for it.
Compare
Writing a whole slew of messages all at once?
Put ’em in a spreadsheet. Writing them side by side makes it easier to achieve consistency in phrasing. It also makes writing or reviewing them with your stakeholders that much easier, and you can make the changes suggested in one place.
When you’re laying out your spreadsheet, you’ll need (at a minimum):
- The area of the product that the message appears in
- A brief description of the problem or issue that triggers the message
- Any interaction notes
- Proposed text
- A link to the product or mock-ups so you and the reviewers can picture each message in context
We like to brainstorm several possible messages for a given error, preferably with the designer and product manager. It’s remarkably efficient, and we can power through a lot of messages in a short period of time.
Prevent
It wasn’t on the list. Technically it’s not a tip on writing error and alert messages, but on avoiding the need for them in the first place. Evaluate the interaction the user engages in and the text they see before an error or an alert triggers. See if you can avoid the need for the message by providing some text (hint, placeholder, instructional), relabeling, or changing the interaction.
Bring content experts (content strategists, UX writers, documentation writers) into your process early. We’re not a panacea, but a content perspective is surprisingly helpful when it comes to the information users are getting. Intuitive, efficient interaction flows from considering content at the outset, which can minimize errors and alerts.
Minimize doesn’t mean eliminate. There will always be errors, whatever the app, whatever the software. Enterprise users deserve intuitive UI and the copy to match, just as consumer users do. Helpful error and alert messages have the potential to accomplish two things: inform and redirect. And how you say it matters. Now shake off all this over-alliteration and go write!
For more on errors and alerts, including the style and language to use, check out the UX Content Style Guide on Workday Design.
