Tell me it’s not my fault
The perfect machines and stupid humans
As humans we often have this belief that machines don’t do mistakes. And if something wrong happens it’s a human error. You often hear that in the news, the plane crashed because of human error. It wasn’t the machine faults so you can be reassured to take the plane again.
So when we see errors on a screen we often think: oh shit I have certainly made something wrong. I’m stupid! I have to try again.
Telling me I’m smart
I was paying with new Swiss mobile payment system called Twint. I select Twint at the cashier, put my phone next to the machine to activate the payment. And shit the payment doesn’t work. Did I do something wrong again?
The machine shows an error message which says something like this:
We are very sorry the error is on our side please try again
Hey! I’m still a smart human! It’s the machin that got it wrong! I just have to help it out a bit by trying again.
Why this error message is smart service design
Often such error messages just say that there is an error. They don’t explain why. I already explained in another article that explaining why error happens is smart. Here it doesn’t really explain why the error happened but I still believe it’s a smart error message. Why?
If you tell me there is a problem and that I have to try again I’ll believe that I did something bad. It’s a human error as in the plan crash. Ahh stupid humans! But hey a lot of tiny errors happen. Maybe the Bluetooth connexion wasn’t strong enough. Or it had a temporary internet connexion issue. Which is definitely not my fault. By acknowledging that it’s the machine fault I don’t really need to know why the error happens. I know it’s not my fault. I know the machine is dumb one and I’m the smart one who is able to fix by trying again.
This message is smart because it gives the power back to the human in an age where people have a tendency to believe machines are smarter than them.
Update
A few month after I originally wrote this article I saw a similar error message on linkedin:
More articles about errors and Service Design
Dealing with errors is a key element of the work or a service designer or business owner. Here a few other articles I wrote on the subject it you want to further explore the topic:
