UX Design & UX Research @ Workiva

Project: Internship | Duration: 6 months | Team: UXD, Content, ENG, PM

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As the lead designer, I enhanced Workiva’s error messaging experience to replace cryptic backend alerts with clear, actionable guidance—empowering users to self-troubleshoot and reducing support dependency.

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TL;DR: Users were receiving vague or technical error messages like "An error occurred" that left them confused. I led the UX effort to rewrite and restructure error messages so they were easy to understand and actionable. This helped users troubleshoot issues on their own and reduced support ticket volume.

Want a deeper dive? Keep scrolling ;)

What does “Update failed.” even mean?

Users frequently encountered vague or technical error messages—like “Update failed” or “Bad request”—without any guidance on resolving them. This led to confusion, increased support tickets, and disrupted workflows in one of Workiva’s most critical features, Connections.

“Techy” error messages

Ambiguous tooltip message

Vague error messages

Users Want Better Error Messages

Actionable error messages were a top user-requested improvement in platform surveys, highlighting a shared pain point that impacted user productivity and support efficiency.