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The Error Page: Why the Fail Whale Works

June 13th, 2011

Marketing, Social Media, UX Design

Drill in hand, my dentist asked me what I was writing about today. “Error messages,” I said.

He groaned from behind his mask. “Those confusing messages with the numbers?  The topic made him nervous. “I wish I could get all that stuff. My grandkids do.”

I told him what motivated me from a content and marketing perspective: Why do some websites shoot off numbers or carelessly worded error messages, even at the risk of inciting dread in the people who help pay their bills? Why, especially, when the users who encounter error messages on a site are the epitome of a captive audience?  Instead of disregarding a visitor’s search error or a server meltdown, embrace the marketing opportunity.

Error Messages are your new stealth marketing tool. Include them in your content strategy.

You might not think it, but even Twitter goes down from time to time. Yet the site takes this frustrating experience and transforms it into a chance to charm the pants off its tweeters and followers.

Web lore has it that cofounder and creative director Biz Stone first seized the opportunity when the site went down during a growth spurt. Instead of just telling users to come back later, he found a positive image to show them exactly what the error was about—a huge issue that a team was working diligently to fix.

The blue-and-orange graphic of birds lifting a whale (created by Yiying Lu) complemented Twitter’s own original blue bird, so the company bought a license off Google Images and posted the cartoon with a simple error message.

Soon dubbed the “Fail Whale,” Twitter’s error message probably generated more tweets than the site outage, and now actually boasts a cult following. The artist has probably made more money by selling T-shirts and coffee cups bearing the image than she did by selling the original cartoon. Who’d have thought an error message could turn a frustration into entertainment? Now, there’s even a Homer Simpson-as-Fail Whale cartoon.

While the average creative director might not have the time to improvise something as cool as the Fail Whale, it still pays to communicate in the best way possible, especially when customers see your site when it’s not functioning properly.

A study by Enterpulse (now owned by Idhasoft) revealed that 66 percent of the professionals surveyed hardly ever go back to a site after having a bad experience.

What’s more, those customers would likely tweet about the experience to their followers, or to post it on their company’s social network.

To avoid this negative press, you have to think ahead. Plan your error-message tactics, and roll them into your content strategy. Build the messages into your content inventories. Think of mistakes as marketing opportunities.

Truly helpful error messages come from a clearly articulated content strategy that is based on a customer-service ethic. Tell the user what happened or why the transaction isn’t working. Word the options precisely, affording the opportunity to recover.

Here are more tips on how to turn a sad user experience into a sweet one:

Show up. Don’t be the manager who never comes to the sales floor for his customers. Have something ready for errors that your programmers didn’t anticipate—even if it’s the chance to chat online or call customer service.

Tell them as accurately as possible what’s the matter. Give users a way to save face, to go back and fill in the specific fields they left blank. For instance, remind them to put numbers in the ZIP code box.

Let them know what they can do better next time.  Anticipate the likely error and offer options. Dyson’s Vacuums is great at this.

Start a conversation with the user.  What were they trying to find when they were misdirected?

Act as if the user is always right. Write content that removes the concept of guilt from the user’s mind. Even if he used letters to enter his Social Security number, suggest that he “Use numbers to complete the field for your Social Security number.” Who knows? Maybe he struck the key for y when he meant to hit 6.

Don’t make yourself look the fool, either. Taking pride in all the content in your site suggests that you give the right attention to your clients and colleagues. Instead of saying—as one message I read did—“Error. Remove the cause of the error”—say what the error is. Content guru Gerry McGovern best illustrated the Internet’s version of a Catch-22: “It’s not OK, and I don’t want to Cancel.”

Use your site’s monitoring capabilities or help desk reporting to identify and track the error messages that your users see most often. Then you can prioritize how to fix them, or otherwise educate your users. It’s also a best practice to create and follow an exception policy  to curtail errors that result from customizing systems.