April 15, 2007 :: 10:40 AM
Better Error Messages: Wrong Done Right
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.
It also isn’t enough just to have a generic error message in place to address these errors by code. What good does it do your user to simply learn that they didn’t succeed? It might be less disturbing to see an error message presented in the same colors and typography as the rest of the website, but it doesn’t do a user any more good than the style-deficient default errors from the server if it doesn’t tell them what to do now that something has gone wrong.
So how do we, as marketers and creators of tools meant to foster trust in users, begin to address this problem? By thinking of our websites and the applications they contain as a form of customer service. You can’t be there to help your customer when they make a mistake in your shopping cart, or registering for your online service - but you can do a few things to help them just the same.
- Add easily accessible explanations anywhere they might be needed.
You’ve seen the little linked question marks, or linked ‘What is this?’ text in other places. Apply it to your forms and pages anywhere something might not be entirely clear to your visitor. Tell them exactly what should go in a form field, or what a piece of information means in the most fundamental terms. Remember that not everyone is an experienced web user. - Write unique, custom error messages as often as you can.
While your ‘page not found’ errors might be the same all over your site, the errors in more critical places should be more specially crafted. Work with your programmer to detect specific errors in your applications - for example, if the CVV2 number for a credit card is wrong, your application should say exactly that, instead of saying only that the credit card information is no good. If your application needed to contact your database and couldn’t, be very clear to the user that the problem is nothing they caused, and give them the means to try again without any penalties (like charging a credit card twice, or losing data they entered). If a user shouldn’t hit their back button, make it very clear in large letters. - Offer a help section or FAQ specifically for the important tasks users perform.
Don’t mix the ‘help’ for your shopping cart or online application in with other help topics. Make it very easy for the user to find answers about exactly what they’re doing, without having to wade through the answers to everything else. An FAQ manager application is a nice way to manage categorized help topics, so users can see all topics or just one important one - but well-thought out static pages can do the trick just as well. - If all else fails, offer personal help.
Be clear about a phone number your visitor can call or an email where they can write for help - or if you can manage it, a live-help chat. Be equally clear about what people should expect when they contact you - how long it will take to get a response back in email, or what hours of the day they should expect an answering machine on your phone.
No application or process is foolproof - but a little thought put into supporting your user through difficult times can go a very long way towards keeping them happy with you - even when things go wrong.
