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The human side of the web applications

Fred Oliveira on February 23, 2006

Flickr is having a massage How many times have you seen Flickr fail? I have seen it happen quite a few times, but something behind the “Flickr is having a massage” message, shown whenever someone tripped on a few cables, keeps me comfortable - it lets me know my photos and those of my friends, are in good hands. It will all be okay, even when something has clearly gone wrong.

The human side of web applications is not about deception. It’s about showing the world that you, the developer, are still behind your keyboard - and that you haven’t given up on your audience. What would you have thought if Flickr said “SERVER ERROR” instead? You’d be climbing up the walls.

Spend some time thinking about how to make your application connect to the user. Make him feel at home and constantly taken care of - they’ll be happier, and you’ll be happier. More information about how the application should speak to its users on this previous blog post.


Comments on this post

jc

that was funny, but so true.

the little things… that is what makes the difference.

Daniel, Rogue Connect

A very cool spin on what otherwise is an annoying error message!

Ted Rheingold

“Spend some time thinking about how to make your application connect to the user. Make him feel at home and constantly taken care of - they’ll be happier, and you’ll be happier.”

Agreed! This has made all the difference at Dogster. Instead of getting people who use the site we have a passionate membership that know we really care about them.

I’d also recommend a human responding to /every/ incoming email. People will remember forever that they heard back from a person. And definitely make to participate in forums or other public conversations where users are questioning or making assumptions about how the site is run.

Cheers for bringing up the topic Fred. Most people still think Web2.0 is Ajax or Tags. The read/write web is just as much about web sites communicating (and listening) as it is the users.

Dey Alexander

I agree that the ‘having a massage’ message somehow softens the blow that a ’server error’ message would otherwise deliver. But I’ve often wondered about the impact of this sort of approach to error messages where the cultural and language contexts differ.

Flickr haven’t managed to pull this off with all their error messages, however. And my recent experience with their customer service (when encountering an error that I think they need to fix) left me cold - and the problem unresolved.

Try this: search in your photostream for a particular tag. On the results page, choose “view as slideshow”. Then click on the link “to the search results” (in the top left of your screen). Then try using the “webmaster” email link to report the error.

May you have more success than I did.

Ben Rowe’s Blog » Blog Archive » Ahh … the sound of a human voice

[...] Fred at WeBreakStuff points out what happens when using Flickr and something goes wrong. We don’t get an error message. Instead, we get,  ‘Flickr is having a massage’. A human voice is speaking here. It’s refreshing to know that some of the most succesful web 2.0 companies are the ones that aren’t taking themselves too seriously. Since when did we all stop talking like people anyway? [...]

kellan

For a rare error message I agree, the odd random interrupt with a bit of humanity is kind of nice.

*However*, for error messages you see frequently I find it very *annoying*. Gmail’s “oops” error message seems disingenuous, like they’re trying to duck their responsibility.

Saul Weiner

At the end of the day, most of us don’t even pay for these services. So it’s tough to really get upset and claim harm when they go down. that’s not to say it should not be frowned upon; but if most of us werre paying, that wouldn’t be such a laughing matter.

As an aside, I found some cool flickr mashups at http://flagrantdisregard.com/flickr/.

What would you do? at Carbonite Life

[...] What would you do if Flickr said something…else? (via WeBreakStuff). [...]

Il bon ton del web 2.0 -- Fucinaweb - Idee per forgiare siti

[...] Anche Federico Oliveira di WeBreakStuff nota come al posto del preoccupante e onnipresente “server error”, Flick adotti una strategia decisamente più rilassante (Flickr is having a massage). Magari chissà che disastro sta succedendo dietro le quinte, ma l’importante è tranquillizzare gli autori sullo stato della loro produzione fotografica. [...]

Sander van de Graaf » Blog Archive » Take some time for a quicky…

[...] Take some time for a quicky… It’s been a while since my last post, but I’m a bit busy arranging everything for my new appartement. Tomorrow I’ll be signing the legal transfer documents, the actual transfer will be on April the 13th. As I don’t have time to write a whole lot of a story, I’m just gonna throw up a neat list of items I found over the last week, and which I think are worth mentioning. You probably read some of them already, but I’ll drop ‘em anyway: Mezzoblue has some nice tips about speaking in public, which might come in handy somewhere soon. I’m supposed to give a presentation over at IDG in a month or so. It’s mainly about web2.0, and I’m hoping that it’ll give some heads up to the people who should care, but actually don’t. WeBreakStuff has a good read about the human side of web applications. Some other page I stumbled upon was CrazyEgg, it’s not public yet, but it sounds promising. Add some markup to your page, and CrazyEgg will produce a (click)heatmap of your site, so that you can easily see which partions of your website are best clicked. Afcourse this is not the same as an eyetracking heatmap, but it can sure give you some relevant insights. I’m trying to figure out how it’s technically done, but I haven’t found the right solution yet. It could be done via rewriting all tags via DOM to some redirect uri’s. But how do they extract the relevant x- and y-coordinates out of that to produce the heatmap? Could it be done via javascript generated image submit buttons? They do deliver coordinates, but could that be of any use, let alone be reliable? There’s a job opening over at Ilse Media… hmmm, tempting… Must-read books, which are on my to-be-ordered-books list: Blink Ruby on Rails: Up and Running Oh, and I rediscovered the last.fm player. [...]

mynimal

I’ve always thought this exact same thing - dropping the official, boring presentation and going for the “Yes, I’m human” approach.

mynimal

(Apologies for the second comment) However, I do not believe that it should be used to mask away the actual cause of the error; maybe something like “Uh oh. (Insert error here)” would probably be best, but if you use any of those on their own it sacrifices some of the information/humanity (Respectively).

ENGRENAGEM - Media e Tecnologia: blog sobre jornalismo, citizen journalism, blogosfera e novas tecnologias

[...] The human side of the web applications [...]

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WeBreakStuff » Wow, talk about 2.0 error messages

[...] Honestly, that made me forget that there was an error in the first place - it didn’t say much about the mental state of the people over at Technorati either, but you know what I mean. When I talked about “Web 2.0″ error messages in the first place I wasn’t really thinking “go insane”, but it sure as hell works. [...]

hyper K

yes yes cool errors are cool. much better then a blue screen.

however how socially transferable is cool? the hsbc commercial (running all over europe and asia) is a perfect example of this. some people drink tea some drink coffee others prefer me…

Azzurra

Buon luogo, congratulazioni, il mio amico!

trama

Ich erklare meinen Freunden uber diese Seite. Interessieren!

imparare

Interesting comments.. :D

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