How many times has it happened to you? You’re using a piece of software or a website, performing whatever task you need or want to perform, and suddenly there’s a useless error message. It tells you that something has gone wrong well enough, but it doesn’t tell you what to do now. It doesn’t say how you can fix it, or what your next step should be, or who you can contact for help.

How do otherwise savvy marketing firms miss this critical part of the user experience? Hours are spent contemplating a user’s experience when everything is going well: how users will find the needed starting point on the homepage, the help text and instructions that will make sure they’re able to follow an easy process, and clear messages about what’s happening all the way. That is, until the user makes a mistake or the software suffers some small problem – and then the user is suddenly cast into uncertainty. In the worst cases, they receive some server-generated error message, citing numeric codes they don’t understand and containing alarming code snippets they have no hope of comprehending. Certainly many users know what a 404 error is – but what about the ’500 Internal Server Error’ that likely runs a close second in frequency? Or the even more ominous ’502 Bad Gateway’ error? For the user, all of these messages seem much more like error 417: expectation failed. The process they were trying to follow has brought them to a confusing dead end, and the website they were trusting to guide them to success has let them down.

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