From a printer manufactured (or probably more accurately, rebadged…) by a nameless large PC manufacturer based in the southwest….
This error message evokes cinematic, ominous drums beating in the distance, implying an impending massive onslaught.
At least it does for me. Your mileage may vary…
But seriously, this is a not-so-great error message for a couple of reasons:
- It’s not informative – it doesn’t tell me a) what the heck a drum is, and b) why I care about a drum warning.
- It doesn’t provide a recommended action – so, I have a “drum warning”…now what? WTF do I do with this information?
And if you look at the available screen real estate, there’s clearly enough room for more information.
…and by some, I mean two. Three if you include the Slideshare pic from a few days ago, which I’ll lazily repost below.
First, here’s one from Mr. Tweet:
Cute, funny, capitalizes on a well-known existing meme. It’s not too objectionable, meaning it’s not going to piss anyone off in a major way. Overall, a good user experience in a crappy situation (i.e., you’ve tried to browse somewhere or save something, and it didn’t work.)
Next, here’s an RSVP and profile “completer” from eVite:
The context is different of course; this isn’t an error message. I get the fact that they’re trying to help people learn more about each other. Still, the “If I found 1K” question is whimsical but bothersome.
I don’t know why it sticks in my craw like it does; maybe it’s that there’s a disconnect between their intent (connecting people and helping people know each other better) and the execution. I guess it’s just that knowing the answer to that question is a crappy way to build connections between people.
So here’s my bottom line: Mr. Tweet w00t, eVite fail.
Oh, and here’s the Slideshare error message that I liked:
So I was looking for a good price on a little Honda I’m interested in. I stumbled across a site that pings all the dealers in my vicinity for their best price.
One thing I do when I’m not sure of how trustworthy a site is…is use my initials instead of my first name. And usually I accompany it with “plus” addressing, which is simply a way to identify if an organization is selling your email address to third parties. You put “pjsherman+[something else]@gmail.com”, and Gmail will still deliver it to your base address. If you start receiving spam at that address, then you know that the company sold your address. And, you can easily block it.
So I fill out the form, and enter “PJ” – short for Paul Joseph – into the first name field.
And the form barfs. Plus, it gets all scoldy with its CAPITALIZATION of CONTACT and VALID. In my head it sounds like a smarmy schoolteacher.
Then I got curious and entered in some variations to see if the form would accept certain two-letter first names.
Nope.
So the upshot is…if you’re Bo or Al or Ty or Jo, this company isn’t interested in your business.
Really? I need permission from EVERYONE?
Well OK, but I think that’s going to take awhile…can you give me some time to get everyone’s permission? Or do you need to know right now?
Fine, be that way.
Here’s another guest post from Andreas Bossard, who you may remember did a well-received post last year on the Sony Ericsson PC Suite. Thanks for contributing again Andreas! -Paul
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How fast things change. I wanted to write about a workflow in LinkedIn, which had annoyed me for months, but they have fixed it in the meantime, before I could publish the article. :) So anyhow, here is the article. -Andreas
One of the most used functions in Linkedin is to add a new user to your own network. If you don’t know the e-mail address of the person or other personal information you can choose “I don’t know xy”.
Then the user can enter a personal message and click the “Send Invitation” button. Which opens the following message:
The only way to proceed is to click “Go back to xy’s profile”. The personal message is lost! You stepped into the Linkedin user trap.
Of course, according to the Linkedin policy you’re supposed to add only contacts you personally know, but since you can bypass this rule anyhow by selecting “Friend”, it’s illusory to educate the user by punishing him to re-enter a personal message.
There are two solutions to avoid this unpleasant interaction:
- A “Close”-Button instead of a “Go back to xy’s profile”-button
- Pop up the message immediately, when the user selects “I don’t know xy”, instead of giving him the feeling, that he now can enter a personal message for that person.
As we can see, they solved it with a “Cancel” link.
(Click picture to see full-sized)
Not much to say about this little guy, except that it reduces peoples’ trust in a website when these types of error messages show up.
I know, I get it: this type of message is helpful to the programmer. But does it have to be exposed to the customer?
