ChatGPT & UX Writing: Accelerating the Creation of Error Messages in Product Design

There’s a common issue for many product designers; we need to work more closely with UX writers or UX content strategists.

While it’s true that some companies involve UX writers within the product team, it’s not a common practice. Product designers often need to create the UX copy for the interface themselves.

It’s fine when discussing microcopies like text for a button or other small UI elements like a label. However, the UX writing process becomes trickier when we need to produce longer written content, for example, for an error message.

We often need more time to craft an effective error message, but we do not have the time, so we insert a temporal text during the design process and modify them at the end.

The issue is that designers, even good UX designers, sometimes deliver poor error messages, leading to user interfaces released with text that do not explain the error to the user well, thus affecting the user experience.

In recent months, I have worked extensively with ChatGPT to find ways and techniques to improve the product designer’s workflow.

In this article, I want to share the technique I created to build a prompt for ChatGPT that will help product designers and UX writers easily generate a variety of useful error messages.

Once you create the prompt, you can run it repeatedly and get many error messages. Let’s dive in to see how to do it.

What this guide is not

Before diving into the process of creating user-friendly error messages with ChatGPT, I need to mention that I am not trying to present this guide as a recipe.

You can find numerous lists of prompts that you can execute to obtain results from ChatGPT. These prompts can cover various topics, not just the creation of error messages.

Instead of copying and pasting the examples of prompts that I will share here, I encourage you to extract the idea of how to create a prompt that will be useful to you. Learning how to use ChatGPT to work effectively would be best.

To illustrate what I mean, you can think of a chef who strives to understand how to create new dishes and combine flavors instead of someone who only knows how to execute recipes.

I am trying to guide you on becoming the chef because that will make you more proficient with ChatGPT.

How does ChatGPT accelerate the creation of error messages in product design?

UX writers are experts in writing text, but product designers write text in the user interface as a secondary task. Our focus is more on understanding the problem and creating great interactions.

Because of that, product designers do not always give full attention to the error text in the process, which can lead to poor messages within the interface. Additionally, in many cases, there are no clear guidelines on how to write useful error messages, resulting in inconsistency in the product.

This is where ChatGPT comes in. It instantly generates multiple error messages, leaving the designer to select the most accurate one for the case.

This effective technique can benefit any product or consulting company design team. After creating the prompt, designers can reuse it to streamline error message creation. Therefore, if you are a design manager, a UX professional, or work as a DesignOps, you can use it to improve the process of UX copy creation within your team.

ChatGPT will not do all the UX writing work, but it is a great shortcut

I need to highlight one point. You must understand how to create a good error message and be critical of ChatGPT’s UX copy results.

ChatGPT sometimes invents the wheel and provides generic errors or inaccurate results. Therefore, you must do more than copy and paste the information generated by ChatGPT.

Remember that you are responsible for the results, not the machine, and errors will be attributed to you. For instance, ChatGPT might provide a message that does not explain the information well to the user, so it is up to you to critique whether it is good enough.

To put it another way, use ChatGPT to generate a draft with multiple options, and it will be your responsibility to select the message that fits the most or select a message and tweak it to fit your needs.

The steps to create the prompt

To explain the process simply, I have divided it into five steps. These steps will help you to go through each point and understand how to create it.

Step 1: Understand how to write good and informative error messages

The first step is to study how to create effective error messages, and there are two reasons for this.

Firstly, relying solely on ChatGPT is a bad idea because you are responsible for making decisions regarding the results it provides. Remember that ChatGPT often reinvents the wheel, so studying the topic well will help you understand how to modify the messages given by ChatGPT.

In addition, it is necessary to create a guide for ChatGPT to explain precisely how to create good error messages.

You must read information and watch many YouTube videos from different resources to create a comprehensive guide. I will also share a step that explains how to use ChatGPT to create the guide you will use in the prompt.

Step 2: Build a guide for writing error messages

Once you have read all the information and feel you understand it, build a guide for writing the messages. This guide will help you better comprehend the information and serve as a guide to assist ChatGPT in generating the error messages.

There is no need to write a comprehensive guide like an article or a blog post; a guide composed of bullet points will suffice.

There are two methods to create the guide. First, manually summarize the information from each guide you read and consolidate all the summaries into one comprehensive guide.

The quicker approach is to copy and paste the article into ChatGPT and request it to summarize the content into bullet points.

Collect all the summaries and use ChatGPT to create a guide summarizing all the bullet points. Remember that you can also copy the transcription of a video and request ChatGPT to perform the same summarization.

To summarize information with ChatGPT, use the following prompt:Please summarize the transcription and provide a bullet point guide for writing error messages.

"Transcription"

You can also ask ChatGPT to generate the guide, but I do not recommend this approach since you want control over the information you rely on when writing the guide. If you ask ChatGPT to do it for you, you cannot know whether the information is correct.

Step 3: Create the prompt

You can build the prompt once you understand how to write effective error messages and create the guide.

To explain how to build the prompt, I use an example of an app for illustrators.

The prompt is built with the following:

Give the prompt a role: “Act as a ux writing expert. You are working for a company that develops an app for illustrators.”

Explain the task: “Your task is to write three error messages for a case where the user uploaded an EPS file, but the app supports only SVG files. I will choose from your suggestions.”

Select the tone: “The tone of the voice should be humble and informative. Please do not be Joyful or funny.”

Describe the users: “The users are professional illustrators, and the tool is their primary work tool.”

Provide additional information:

• The error message will appear on a model (pop-up).
• Keep the message as short as possible.
• Please go to the point. No need to add text apart from the minimum information necessary.
• The modal will include two buttons. One to close the modal and one to upload again. Please provide labels.

Add the guidelines:

• The error message should explain the problem well.
• Use positive words. Avoid using negative words.
• Do not blame the user.
• Avoid using jargon.
• Explain to the user how to solve the issue.

Here is an example of the promptAct as a ux writing expert.

Act as a ux writing expert. 

You are working for a company that develops an app for illustrators.

Your task is to write three error messages for a case where the user uploaded an EPS file, but the app supports only SVG files. I will choose from your suggestions.

The tone of the voice should be humble and informative. Please do not be Joyful or funny.

The users are professional illustrators, and the tool is their primary work tool.

More information:
-The error message will appear on a model (pop-up).
-Keep the message as short as possible.
-Please go to the point. No need to add text apart from the minimum information necessary.
-The modal will include two buttons. One to close the modal and one to upload again. Please provide labels.

Guide:
-The error message should explain the problem well.
-Use positive words. Avoid using negative words.
-Do not blame the user.
-Avoid using jargon.
-Explain to the user how to solve the issue.

Step 4: Run the prompt and iterate

Now run the prompt in ChatGPT and see the results. From there, start to iterate and improve the prompt to get better results.

Here are some examples:

1. Try running it in ChatGPT 4, both with and without being connected to Bing, to see the results.
2. Change the script and rerun it to observe the results. For instance, instead of typing a prompt like “Act like a ux expert,” try using “Act like an editor” to see how the results vary.
3. Change the order of the information in the prompt and consider adding or removing bullet points from the guide.
4. Include more information about the users.
5. ChatGPT can generate more messages if you are not satisfied with the results.
6. To achieve better results, add examples to the prompt.
7. You can write a guide for specific error messages. This will make the message more accurate and less like a generic error message. For example, You can write a guide specifically for 404 pages for greater accuracy.

Here is the resultError Message 1:
"Oops! Unsupported File Type"
"Your file is an EPS, but our app thrives on SVG files. Please upload your work as an SVG to proceed."
Buttons: "Try Again" and "Close"

Error Message 2:
"Hmm, Looks Like We Need SVG"
"Your uploaded EPS file isn't compatible. We'd love to see your work in SVG format!"
Buttons: "Upload SVG" and "Dismiss"

Error Message 3:
"SVG Required for Upload"
"We noticed your file is an EPS. To keep things flowing smoothly, please switch to an SVG file."
Buttons: "Re-upload as SVG" and "Close"

Step 5: Save the Prompt

Once you are okay with the results, save the prompt for the next time you need to create another error message. This way, you will be able to get many ideas easily for an error message, and you will not need to start from a blank page.

You can save it in Confluence, Notion, Google Docs, or any other tool that works for you. If you work this way, you can quickly create the messages.

More tips

1. Consider creating prompt templates for other common error messages, such as displaying a validation error message next to the corresponding input field (inline validation).
2. Do not copy and paste the results. Think about your goal and what you want to say to the user. If you only copy and paste the messages generated by ChatGPT, you will not get the real value from the process because you have yet to think about the message. Remember that ChatGPT helps you with the work but only does some of the work for you.
3. Please share it with your team members to get feedback and improve the message. This Is good advice for any process, but in this case, it can be even more helpful because chatGPT gives the feeling that we do not need to think. By involving others, you can be sure that someone will be able to critique your work.
4. Please add the prompt to the design system documentation. This way, all the designers in the company will have a place where they can copy the prompt and use it. This can be beneficial for ensuring consistency in the messages within the app and also improving the efficacy of the designers in the team.

To summarize

In this article, I showed you a great technique for generating error messages with ChatGPT.

We started by reviewing how ChatGPT can accelerate the creation of error messages, and I explained why you could not rely solely on it and why It was important to understand how to write error messages yourself.

Then, I showed you a technique with five steps to build and craft a prompt that you could use repeatedly to generate error messages. This meant creating a template prompt and running it whenever you needed ideas for error messages. In the end, I also provided some additional tips for the process.