The one piece of universal knowledge shared among PC users is the frustration associated with the “blue screen of death.” You know, the frightening “I am crashing” message your computer displays as you finish the last line of a term paper. It’s less common among newer machines, but still around for those of us who push our systems to and beyond the breaking point.
There’s even a blue screen of death hidden on a mult-player map in the popular X-Box game, Halo 2.
For years, though, most of us thought the sinister error screen was limited to personal computers. We expected television systems to function perfectly and enterprise-level computer arrays to hum nicely. The blue screen of death was something seen when the “little guy” does something wrong on his home computer system. Right?
This weekend, I went with my family to one of the casinos by the coast. Low and behold, the blue screen of death featured in all it’s glory on one of the big screen televisions. I assumed (out of my preconceived notion that the blue screen of death never happened in the “big guy” world of casinos) that it was part of a new game.
Nope. It was just one of their computers on the fritz.
Isn’t it amazing, though, how everyone knew what it was? They immediately knew that, not only was the machine broken, but the casino used a Windows system. I even heard a few people mutter explicatives directed towards Microsoft as they passed by their favorite, now out-of-order, slot machine.
When things work, your customers love you. When they don’t work, they’re quick to disown you … and characteristic “sorry, but we can’t serve you right now” messages are easily remembered.
What mental associations do you want your customers to have about your product? If you were Microsoft, would you want people recognizing the power and ease with which your system runs? Or would you want them pointing out an error message when it breaks?
Ouch, the blue screen of death hurts. Marketers can learn a lesson from the blue screen of death when designing their own error message screens on their websites. An error page is much more acceptable when there’s a picture of a Fail Whale and a funny little message telling you that the company is working on the problem. Try to have your error pages work for you, not against, as much as possible. Great post!