Language Matters with Error Messages

July 14, 2004

Chapter three of Defensive Design for the Web is called Language Matters. It covers three important guidelines from the book.

• Don’t use language that might be unfamiliar to your customers.
• Keep text brief and easy to understand.
• Be polite.

So, the other day, while using my gmail account, I ran across probably one of the best and enjoyable error messages from a company. This is what google had to say.

Sorry, something didn’t work correctly.

If we knew exactly what the problem was, we would tell you instead of giving you this useless error message. Actually, if we knew, we would most likely have fixed it already.

Rest assured. As you read this, alarm bells are ringing at the Googleplex, signifying something has gone horribly wrong in this quadrant. A report will soon be in the hands of our engineering team, detailing the bad thing that happened here. This team will work without rest to address the problem you have brought to their attention.

If, after a decent interval (about 24 hours), you encounter this problem again, please email us at accounts-support@google.com . The more specifics you include, the better (e.g., what kind of computer and browser you were using, what page you looked at last, what you clicked on, etc.). Sometimes, even our engineers need a little help.

Thanks for using Google.

The language is easy to read and yet also enjoyable. Although it wasn’t brief, it didn’t bother me and I wanted to keep reading on. And it wasn’t in your face but rather polite.

These types of errors are inevitable and when they happen it leaves the visitor guessing what happened, but what google has done is set my concern at ease and really left me feeling that they were actually on top of the error and were going to fix it.

Great example an error message. Anybody else ever run into error messages that you like?