BARRY COLLINS
Developers need to do a better job of explaining themselves when things go wrong
As the recent Fastly outage showed, developers need to do a better job of explaining themselves when things go wrong.
O
n the morning of 8 June, a good chunk of the internet decided to take a little nap.
The Guardian, the Financial Times,
The Verge, Forbes, PayPal, Vimeo, HBO Max and plenty of others were all knocked offline.
The first I became aware of a problem was when I went to visit The Verge and was confronted by a rather odd error message: Error 503 Service Unavailable Service Unavailable Guru Mediation: Details: [a meaningless, long string of digits appeared here] Varnish cache server
Oh, those wags at The Verge, I thought. Although the cache server had vanished, not varnished from what I could make out…
Turns out it wasn’t just The
Verge’s dry humour. This was the message appearing on all the sites that had been struck down by a bug at CDN provider Fastly, which occurred when one of its customers tweaked a setting and inadvertently took down several major websites for the best part of an hour.
Tens, maybe hundreds of millions of people would have seen the message above, but only about a dozen of them would have had the first clue what it meant. I wonder how many people rebooted their computer, kicked their router or launched a verbal volley at the poor sods at the end of the broadband support lines because they couldn’t work out why half the internet had vanished.
Software does a terrible job of crisis management. I’ve been sent on enough management courses to know that the first rule of crisis management is communicate clearly. Yet, when our computers hit a problem, they might as well start talking in Swahili rhyming slang for all the sense they make to the average punter.
Software error messages swing from one extreme to another. They are either an unintelligible stream of jargon, such as the error message above, or they’re of the patronisingly twee variety – the “uh oh, something’s gone wrong” bracket of messages that make me want to kick the author firmly in their input/ output sockets. T
he end result – as Max Rozen from website-monitoring firm Atlassian wrote in a brilliant blog post – is that the user feels stupid. “The last thing you want to do is make your users feel dumb, or as though they’re at fault for an issue with the service,” he wrote at
onlineornot.com. “Communicating who caused the error helps clear up any confusion.”
As Rozen points out, this isn’t a hot take. As far back as 1998, the web usability guru Jakob Nielsen was basically telling developers to stop being dicks. All error messages, Nielsen wrote, should be:
written in plain n language that’s easy to understand for non-technical users and that doesn’t imply that the mistake is the user’s fault precise in specifying exactly what was done wrong
constructive in suggesting steps the user can take to correct the problem
Whoever wrote the 503 error message above didn’t get the memo. P
oorly worded error messages can even compound the harm. One of the sites taken down in the Fastly fiasco was the UK government website, including the service that’s used for booking Covid-19 vaccinations. This on the day after a new age group was allowed to book their vaccinations for the first time.
When people try to reach a site like that and find it’s not working, they will use other methods to get what they want. How many people, I wonder, ended up calling 111 or their local GP because they were worried they were going to miss out on their jabs? How many people with more urgent medical problems couldn’t get through as a result? And all because the error message on the website contained an in-joke that harks back to the days of the Commodore Amiga instead of something meaningful, something that reassures them the site will be back soon.
“There’s a place for fatuous flippant would-be humorous inanities,” said Rowan Atkinson’s Inspector Fowler in The Thin Blue
Line, “and that place is on Noel’s
House Party.” It most certainly isn’t computer error message screens. Grow up, developers. barry@mediabc.co.uk
They might as well write the error messages in Swahili rhyming slang for all the sense they make to the average punter
How many people ended up calling 111 or their local GP because they were worried they were going to miss out on their jabs?