Warning messages
tl;dr - Know your product's theme and find areas to hammer that message home.
Background
Waze is a driving app, whose goal is to find the best route for drivers using real-time traffic data. So when some bright red text appeared on screen - it seemed like a bad thing.
Only it wasn't.
There were a lot of these messages that simply were added to give some feedback to the developers.
For example, when someone changed the voice they wanted to hear driving directions, this message would appear on the screen.
What does this even mean? Aside from using language no one uses in their everyday life, the red font color and the percentage countdown made drivers think they needed to wait for this to complete before the app would work.
(Spoiler: they didn't - voice directions would still work even if the download hadn't completed.)
Solution
After running an audit, I found a series of system messages that didn't impact the user experience, but were completely confusing.
Instead of trying to convince the engineering team to remove these messages, I saw it was an opportunity to remind drivers of the benefits of Waze.
So whenever the app needed to do something technical that didn't impact, I created a list of messages to replace the old technical message with a new benefit-driven message.
The result was now a series of messages that reinforce Waze's key differentiators. So instead of worrying drivers, now there are messages reassuring drivers that Waze is working for them.
