November 21st, 2004
The sorrowful blue screen of death
Recent research into the effectiveness of “polite” software–software that apologizes when things go wrong–has found that it can improve the user experience significantly. Most people seem to respond favorably to expressions (patently insincere or maybe “a-sincere”) of regret when a program misbehaves or otherwise violates expectations.
So what?
This story reminds me of what is perhaps the greatest, and least noticed, error message of all time. It was used by the pre-breakup AT&T phone system, and you got it when you dialed an invalid telephone number: *Beep* “We’re sorry; we are unable to complete your call as dialed. Please check the number and dial again, or ask your operator for assistance. Thank you.”
You have to love an error message that starts by apologizing and ends by thanking you for making the mistake. Psychologists used to prescribe this message for their depressed patients: “Cheer up! Dial a few invalid numbers!” (Not really, as far as I know.) Since research is now supporting a lesson AT&T learned years ago, maybe we’ll start to see kinder, gentler software in the future. –from Ed Gottsman
