Daily UX Writing Challenge

Scenario: A traveler is in an airport waiting for the last leg of a flight home when their flight gets abruptly canceled due to bad weather.

Challenge: Write a message from the airline app notifying them of the cancellation and what they need to do next.

Headline; 45 characters

Body: 175 characters max

Button(s): 25 characters max

Flight App Notifications

Overview

This case study highlights how an airline app can notify its users about the cancellation of a flight and what they can do next.

Assuming, Daniel is the traveler.

My Approach

I found this prompt particularly challenging because a traveler might not like a situation where he or she will have to either reschedule for a new flight (no service fee) or go back home after they get the notification that their flight has been canceled due to the weather condition.

The worst-case scenario here would be the user either rescheduling or canceling the flight for another time.

I took 5 minutes to:

Explore the travelers thoughts and feelings
How to write the copy

Final Copy

Hi Daniel, we are sorry to inform you that your flight has been canceled due to a recent weather condition. Please, kindly reschedule.

Rationale

Despite wanting to sound more conversational and apologetic, due to the character count I prioritized explaining the problem and offering a quick solution.

Note: I deliberately apologized concerning the bad weather so as to alleviate blame.

After providing the reason for the flight cancellation, I then focused on the solution. This solution could be accessed by clicking “Reschedule” or “Cancel flight”.

Conclusion

I put myself in the traveler’s thoughts and feelings to figure out how best to tell the traveler about a flight cancellation on the airline app.

After thinking about possible options, I ended up apologizing to the traveler and letting the traveler know it was not his or her fault.

In the end, I wrote a concise copy to improve the traveler’s experience using the airline app.