Or: A Handful of 'Uh-Ohs'
Here’s a selection of error messages I’ve come across recently and my thoughts on the words used in the designs to help users get back on track.
Etsy
I could (and let’s be honest, regularly do) spend hours and hours scrolling through all the beautiful designs on Etsy. I love the creativity and the joy and the pure love that the makers clearly pour into their crafts. I find it a very happy, inspiring place to be.
It also makes me very happy that they have such lovely error messages. This one popped up while I was trying to add something to my basket while on a train travelling through some very pretty but very internet-blocky Yorkshire hills:
It fits Etsy’s fun, simple, positive, human voice beautifully. It’s also a great example of how UX copy and visual design can work in perfect harmony. By pairing their message with the cute doodle of the three-armed jumper and the sad-yet-oh-so-adorable-looking ball of wool, Etsy demonstrates how visual design can be supported by UX writing that’s clear, concise, conversational, and useful - and vice versa.
Le Creuset also does a lovely job of combining helpful words and imagery to create a brilliantly on-brand 404 page-not-found message, as does Coca Cola. These two also provide lots of suggestions for what users can do next, helping them to achieve what they set out to (which is our job as UXers), as well as to keep them browsing for other things (which will make the marketing department very happy bunnies indeed).
Amazon
Okay. So. I won’t lie. I’m not sure how I feel about this one:
Unlike Etsy, where the image and text are aligned with the overall brand style and voice, Amazon’s use of a perplexed-looking (though admittedly very cute) dog and all-caps ‘UH-OH’ don’t sit quite right. For me, Amazon’s usual voice is pretty sophisticated, smart, and straightforward. Not ‘corporate’ per se, but professional. The dog just seems quite … random. And the ‘UH-OH’ is kind of shouty, but, without the expected exclamation mark on the end, it also kind of looks like someone just left caps-lock on by accident, and the full stop is quite abrupt.
I do like that Amazon takes the blame for what’s going on, saying that something went wrong “on their end” rather than placing the fault with the user. But I do wonder how well this is understood in English-speaking countries other than the UK. It strikes me as quite a colloquial, perhaps even dialectal way of saying that the Amazon are to blame for the problem, but I’m not sure how common it is in, say, America. Presumably (hopefully) they localise the message for different markets. I couldn’t actually find a definition of ‘on my end’ with a quick Google search, though I did find an interesting thread on StackExchange that talks about the difference between ‘on my end’ and ‘on my part’.
Trainline
I like the Trainline app a lot. It’s my go-to for booking train tickets, as well as for checking the status of trains I’m waiting for to see whether they’re running late / if I’ve got time to grab a cup of tea and a biscuit before I head to the platform.
Their style is both professional as well as quite fun, a little bit quirky, and down-to-earth. Whenever I make a booking, the success message that excitedly exclaims ‘You’re going to Basingstoke!’ always makes me smile. Sometimes the app is even more excited about my journey than I am.
The error message for when a user enters too many railcards is a great example of fun, conversational UX writing that also helps the user to understand why something isn’t right and what they can do to change it:
As much as I like the conversational tone, though, the “Well, this is awkward” line could be interpreted in a couple of ways - either that Trainline is embarrassed that they can’t let you have that many railcards (their bad), or, that Trainline is embarrassed for you that you tried to do something so silly as enter 27 railcards for a single-person journey (your bad). To be fair though, I might be overthinking that one.
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