When we opened our little online store last year, it was important to me that we get all of the text right, from the storefront welcome to the descriptions of each product. I wanted it to sound like us, not unlike the way we tell our students to write their college essays to sound like them.
What I forgot to do was pay attention to the text that’s not part of the store, but part of the process. What does it say on each page of the checkout screen? What does the invoice say? What’s the message when there’s an error? It was clear that we’d come up short in most of those instances. In fact, most were just the default text that our web service uses. It didn’t sound like us at all, and worse, it wasn’t very helpful for the user.
For example, when a customer bought something, this is the next screen we gave them:
I would never say the exact words, “Thank you for your purchase.” So why make that our thank-you language? Why are we telling them to go to their email to find the download link if it’s right there on the screen? And why do they have to wait 24 hours to email us if they don’t get a confirmation?
So I re-did the page to say this:
Now it actually gives them some helpful information. It also sounds like a real person wrote it. And it makes it clear what to do if they have any problems.
Here’s an example of the screen someone would see if they had clicked a bad link or mistyped a url for our site:
It's not very helpful. It's not very pleasing to the eye. And tell me why "Web Page" is capitalized?
Here’s the re-worded version:
Here’s the screen they saw if there was a problem logging into their account:
It’s never good to flash the word “Denied” when helping kids get into college. It tells them to contact us, but doesn’t tell them how to do it. And the capitalization is at best questionable.
Here’s the re-designed screen:
I’ve got a lot of other screens/messages to improve. But hopefully soon, all of our system messages will be helpful when a customer needs help, they won’t frustrate people, and they'll sound like us.
katiegate says
Love this. It’s surprisingly rare to find this type of language in system messages, and it’s so refreshing when you come across it.
Jane Kulow says
Well done. I thought you might enjoy this take on an error page, where (as with yours) the message was rewritten to better represent the website:
http://mashable.com/2012/07/13/therollingstones-error-message/