Error messages as poetry from Condé Nast & Zendesk

UX writing is a labor of love. It takes tireless collaboration, patience, and experience to write straightforward, clear, and compelling UX copy. So we don’t often get to craft the most emotional—nor romantic—prose. But during our recent meetup, the Condé Nast UX Writing team and the Zendesk Content Design team challenged ourselves to write error messages as poetry.

Last week, team leads Chelsea Larsson (Zendesk) and Sophie Tahran (Condé Nast) hosted a virtual meetup, complete with icebreakers, activities, and breakout sessions for their teams to get to know each other and nerd out on all things UX content. Over the past few months, our team has started slating in some time for team meetups to round out our networks and learn from other practitioners in the field. It’s been a rewarding experience listening to, learning from, and just hanging out with people who are in love with the same discipline—and we’re ready to make it a habit.

Beyond talking shop, a few planned activities helped us get to know one another. One of the first items on the agenda was—what else?—a creative writing exercise. The prompt was simple:

And the results were—well, we’ll let you see for yourself…