Blog 404

As my Twitter followers are aware, I spent an hour hanging around Birmingham International Railway Station for a train back to New Street today, which was late due to “severe delays”.

We all know and accept that things go wrong, but I think many of us are now immune to the standard-issue apologies we receive when this happens. What’s infinitely more valuable than a blank apology is a helpful suggestion: “board this train and change at New Street and continue your journey from there”.

While I was waiting, and not knowing how long I would be sitting at the station café, I started thinking about how most Websites deal with unforeseen problems.

In his book The Big Red Fez, permission marketing guru Seth Godin looks at ways we as Website owners and developers can make our users’ lives easier in the unlikely event of a loss of cabin pressure.

Rather than a 404 (page not found) error or a search that yields no results, why not say sorry and then suggest some of the most popular pages on your site? If a page stops working, why not get a quick form together than emails your Webmaster, provide a direct email link or list a telephone number?

Railway stations are good because they try not to leave you feeling helpless, but Websites do that to users all the time. You could be on the verge of converting a visit into a sale when the link between your site and the payment system fails, and their order details, along with their confidence in you, is lost.

The microblogging site Twitter is as famous now for its all-too-frequent error messages as it is for its revolutionary offering, but interestingly enough someone has done the contingency work for them. Twiddict lets you cache your tweet on their server until Twitter is ready to receive it. Brilliant!

So with Twitter having bought Summize, surely the next best move would be to acquire Twiddict, re-brand it, keep it on another server and send all over-capacity or “something is technically wrong” messages its way.

That’s a quick example for a fairly frivolous site, but the same pattern can be adopted anywhere. Your error page doesn’t have to follow the same design pattern as your main site: after all, your visitors are probably only going to click the back button again, so if you have a few sites, why not upload some contingency forms to a cheap Linux host and redirect your errors to the relevant form?

Just extending a helping hand to your visitors when things aren’t going their way - no-one cares if things aren’t going your way, sorry! - can really make a difference and once in a while it’ll bring you a conversion you otherwise might have lost.

Why is it that nothing seems to work any more? Websites constantly kick out 404 errors, my OneNote is always getting out-of-sync with my Outlook task list, Dreamweaver is always forgetting my FTP details, and I can’t think of a time when Adobe Acrobat has ever actually worked inside IE.

If you buy a product from a company like Sony, you’re pretty much guaranteed that it’ll work perfectly and never break, because their “reassuring expensiveness” is justified by great build quality. But why does this rule not seem to apply for desktop and web apps?

Now a cynic might attribute some of this down to the ineptitude of software developers such as Microsoft, but I think that’s a complete cop-out. The reason Macs don’t have such widely reported problems is that hardly anybody uses them, because there’s no reason for them, other than to provide work for Mitchell and Webb when they’re between series.

No, I think the constant stream of bugs, be they online or offline, is due not to simple ineptitude, but to the pressure under which people continually put themselves. If the deadline for Windows Vista had been properly thought out and not then been put back, and back, and back (I first blogged about Vista in December 2005 as one of the things to look out for in ’06), maybe it would work flawlessly. If the guys behind MySpace weren’t so keen to attract more and more visitors to their site, maybe they’d spend a couple of days ironing out the myriad bugs and imperfections that plague the site.

I find it so strange that we come to accept crashes, internal server errors or “quirks” as just part of life; it’s also not helpful when certain software giants (naming no names, Bill) continually deny that many of their oldest bugs even exist, a fact which has given rise to a saying in our office: “this bug is by design”.

But what does one do? Complain to the developer? Your local MP? The European Court of Human Rights? Is it not your right to be able to use a piece of software without fear that your brain will turn to cheese through repressed anger at its various gremlins? OK, maybe that’s a bit OTT, but how about the next time you come across a problem with a website or a piece of software, take five minutes to get in touch with the developers if you can, and let them know. If it’s a large company, chances are they already know about it and probably aren’t doing much to counteract it, but if you don’t ask, you don’t get, and you never know, your email could be the straw that breaks the Project Manager’s back and forces him or her to schedule in that bug fix, if only to stem the flow of abuse.

Just a thought. Go in peace.