Apologies for writing two SFTWs in a row on the topic of failure but this week I wanted to share a story of UX that I love... and hope you will too!I'll start by explaining what the Fail Whale is... When Twitter gets overloaded and goes out of service, instead of giving a techie failure message you get the friendly picture of the 'Fail Whale' (below), a polite apology and instruction on next steps.
The interesting thing is that it seems to absorb a lot of frustrations and, in fact, the fail whale now actually now has a cult following! Check out the fan club http://failwhale.com/ where you can buy the t-shirt! Or if you're really excited why not go ahead and get the tattoo Click here
Now, I'm not saying we need pictures of whales but here are a few thoughts to tie this back into our roles as BAs:
- It shows the value of spending time on actively designing the User eXperience for when things don't quite go to plan... giving the appropriate consideration to the 'unhappy path' as well as the happy one.
- Its a rare event that error messages make people happy and we can't stop all exceptions but we can be sure to handle them as well as possible.
- When things do go wrong use a style that's meaningful and explains to the user what's going on and, perhaps most importantly, what they need to do.
- Ensure that error messages can be communicated back to IT support teams in a meaningful way when required and that there are unambiguous (e.g. unique numbering) for as many outcomes as possible.
- It's important to consider this with process failure as well as IT failure. Can we automate the feedback of something going wrong in an operational process? (LEAN visual management techniques spring to mind)
Check out the designers page http://yiyinglu.com/
http://failwhale.com/
CNN http://edition.cnn.com/
www.twitter.com
Enjoy and have a great weekend-
David
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