Errors From Heaven
“Fail fast”— startup business mantra
We’ve hear it: “Fail fast”, it’s a mantra for startup businesses. It makes sense, it costs less to fix the issues early rather than later.
How about programming? Developers tend to downplay errors and we only focus on the “right” path. Actually it even from UX, the happy path is always the designed one. But isn’t an error also part of the right path? An error is not a bug: it’ not an unexpected behaviour. So many things can go wro…errr not the way we would like it to be, the connection can be down, the server might be unresponsive, etc.
Errors are not there to make our life harder, quite the opposite actually. We need to design for errors. It’s a chance to show how amazing the app is.
“Oops, something went wrong” — A lot of apps
There a difference between an app that would just say: “Oops, something went wrong” and “Connection issue. Please double check your internet connection, and retry”.
The “Oops” option doesn’t help at all, we are basicall telling the user that we didn’t expect that to happen.
The “Retry” option tells the user what’s happening, and a way to solve it. That could even be after we retried 3 times silently and show this message when there is no way to recover.
Here is a simple flow to follow when you are coding something that can fail:
This is the “je ne sais quoi” of great apps: Errors are an opportunity to make your user more comfortable with your app, give them a sense of control.
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