The Web-based Outlook on a Dell PC: this is the setting. On the desktop there is an Outlook graphic/button. The user double clicks and then they see the following screen.
The first bit of information is the number of 500. What does it mean? Nothing to the user…maybe the Fortune 500, the Indy 500….it could be anything or nothing. You don’t know.
The expected user action after double-clicking is to open something: as in open Outlook to access your inbox and meetings, etc.
It isn’t to see the number 500.
The next bit of information is the words Something Went Wrong. This information is also unhelpful. What went wrong? Did the user make an error? Is there a problem with Outlook? The information is too vague to be useful.
The third piece of information is just as or even more confusing: You don’t have permission to perform this action.
Double-clicking on a desktop icon doesn’t require any permission, so the statement doesn’t make sense.
To review, by this point the user has been presented with three lines of information:
500
Something went wrong.
You don’t have permission to perform this action.
None of this information is helpful or meaningful. The goal of UX writing is to help the user complete her or his actions or tasks. It is not to confuse the user with meaningless information.
Under the third line of text there is a button with text inside that tells the user to Refresh page. This text is also unhelpful and illogical. Why would the user refresh a page with unhelpful meaningless text?
So, at that point, at least there is an action to take, and in fact, despite all the irrelevant and confusing information, the user actually does arrive at the Outlook inbox. This result does not logically follow from the lines of information that precede the Refresh the page button, however.
Similarly, the More details link below the button, when clicked, displays some IP address and code information, which again, is not useful.
Effective UX writing is supposed to guide the user to complete actions not to be vague or unhelpful.