20090303

Problem ID: 6653399307735245140
Entered by: Pradeep Soundararajan

What is technically wrong? What did I notice?

  • I don't think I noticed anything but what you see in the following screenshot.
  • What is technically wrong?
  • If they aren't aware of what is wrong how would they know is it technical or non technical?
  • What are the non technical things that could go wrong?




Do you also notice that sentence that has information thanking me for noticing the problem, itself is hardly noticeable? I mean what you can or cannot read below the "Something is technically wrong".

  Edit

6 Comments:

March 3, 2009 at 1:38 PM  
Comment ID: 5915880519149691116
Written by: Ben Simo

I like the Twitter error messages. They don't contain lots of useless (to me) technical details.

Twitter's error screens are great examples of how humor and cute images can be used to quell user frustration when things go wrong.

Ideally, I'd like to see Twitter take care of the errors on the back end and not show me any error messages. IMO, these cute images are the next best thing.

March 3, 2009 at 2:25 PM  
Comment ID: 230603032937000197
Written by: Anonymous

I would have to agree with Ben.

The Twitter error pages, even the whale one is much better than the standard error pages you see on other sites.

March 3, 2009 at 2:51 PM  
Comment ID: 2548822038458031273
Written by: Michael Bolton http://www.developsense.com

I like the whimsy, but I think the message could be much more informative. What went wrong? When are you going to fix it? Am I at risk? What about my data?

---Michael B.

March 3, 2009 at 2:54 PM  
Comment ID: 2170905746933354284
Written by: Anonymous

Ben, I'm sorry, saying "Ideally, I'd like to see Twitter take care of the errors on the back end and not show me any error messages" is the same as saying that you'd like Twitter to be the one perfect Web app. The user made a request and the Twitter server went kaboom. You'll either get a blank page, a useless server error message or a Twitter sorry-for-that-it-could-be-worse message. There are not much more options. Unless I'm missing something.

March 3, 2009 at 3:04 PM  
Comment ID: 5497484904332038591
Written by: Ben Simo

I'm not expecting Twitter, or any other app, to be perfect. However, in my experience, there is often more that could have been done to handle errors without involving the user.

I don't know what led to the error message above, so I don't know if this is a case that might have been handled better.

If the Twitter app were constructed to do so, it could possibly retry requests without involving the user. Maybe Twitter does.

March 4, 2009 at 7:02 AM  
Comment ID: 6638341919340338784
Written by: Pradeep Soundararajan

Let me explain what lead to above. I noticed that a new person had been following me. I went to that person's profile and then wanted to return to my own profile.

Boom! I got the above.

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