UX Copywriting in Product Design

I'm not sure "We couldn't open your camera" is any better than "Camera error". How does a normal person "open" a camera? It's just as stuck in technical abstractions.

And "Oops something went wrong! Try again later!" is more cutesy but gives nothing substantial above "Request failed. Retry.". I would hope that a UX designer doing their job properly would think about the user, how they interact with the message, and come to the conclusion that "later" is uselessly vague. "Try again now" or "try again tomorrow" are useful and actionable.

There seems to be a lot more appreciation that UX is important and a proportional increase in UX fluff. Not much of it seems to be very thoughtful.

I think there's a parallel in UI design. There's decades of HCI research, but redesigns seem to be more concentrating on making things look pretty, not easier to use.

I vehemently disagree that the goal of UX writing should be to make users click on a "call to action" button. That is marketing, not UX.

The goal of good UX writing should be that the users understand what happens if they click the button.

I always find these kinds of articles, as this one, to have too little examples of the message they are trying to convey. It makes it feel as if the writer came up with the subject first and when they tried to find examples to back up their idea they couldn't find any. Maybe writers should then forget about their article or bench it for later, so that they can gather examples over a longer period of time. It just makes your message so much more compelling when you can show the reader what you mean than asking them to take your word on it.

> Oops! Something went wrong! Could you please try again later?

I like the gist of the article but this particular message has everything wrong.

- Oops! - please don’t, it makes you look like you do not know what you are doing

- Something went wrong! - what exactly? Is this because of me or you? I’d like to at least see if there is something I can do or not. For example whether I do not have internet access or your server is down

- try again later... when? In a minute, tomorrow?

If you provide an error message, without providing some way of getting the actual details of the error that occurred easily, then that is almost a hanging offense.

Saying "Oops, an error occurred, try again later" is essentially useless. Especially after you've seen it more than a few times. Moreover, this kind of thing I have seen first-hand leads to some bizarre magical thinking on the part of users, on the order of "If I slaughter a rooster, and sprinkle the blood around, and a white goose flies overhead, the problem gets resolved." It's staggering seeing some of the "workarounds" that customers will invent if there isn't real error information present.

> How writers say it

> "Let's talk", "Oops! Something went wrong..."

> ...Because writers are good at grammar and punctuation...

Struggling for relevance and failing. If that's all they can offer, they offer no value. No, it's not because I have a blind spot as a developer, but because I know my users.

That is not to say that the technical / UI writers are redundant. It's just the level of most is ridiculously low. It's like with web design: lots of providers, but only a handful of those that know what they are doing.

Heck, I'd be happy to outsource many of my content writing chores but I am yet to find a combination of functional brain, ability to analyse the tech, and sensible rates!

I know a multinational where the technical documentation department was busy copying the documentation from an internal portal (Confluence) to an external customer-facing portal. They would ask the developers to write the documentation and what parts should be copied. Amazingly, they often couldn't do even that properly. They had nice-sounding titles like "manager", "director", "analyst", etc. To the company's merit, the idiocy was eventually discontinued, but it took years.

Hmmm. I don't think this article get what UX copywriting means... It's not about sounding personal or cool, but rather revealing the clear purpose of a function... There's no real UX advantage by replacing "Contact Us" with "Let's Talk"... Perhaps it increases your conversions or clicks, but it's not giving the user any added extra benefit or increased clarity.

I think the point made is solid but I absolutely despise cutesy lingo in utilitarian applications. "Oops! Leggo my Eggo?!" Please don't turn your app into oops and boops unless it is a game or nonserious work.

Struggling to take seriously a copywriting article with the title “Why is UX Copywriting so Important in Product Design”

The HN comments are entirely negative about this article, while the ones on the article itself are entirely positive (or supportive).

I think that means our good friend Mr Censorship has come to town!

Really, if you write about UX and don't want to engage in a decent counter-argument, you should be doing something else.