The Most Useless Error Message
Issue #46 - January 30, 2025
Maybe it’s just me, but I feel that I have been coming across the words above a lot more recently. They seem to have become the standard generic error message whenever a website, or associated process, hits an issue.
From an efficiency and consistency point of view I can see the benefit of having standard wording to display when something unexpected happens.
BUT, and maybe it is just me, “Something Went Wrong” is the least helpful message, because my initial reaction is always “What went wrong?”
It’s not an actionable statement, nor is it informative from a customer’s perspective.
Was it a system error, a processing error, a network error, or did I do something that caused the error?
As for the small invitation to “Please try again”, I find that equally annoying. Try what again? Do I need to reenter my information on a form? Log out and log back in? Or just hit “Submit” or “Send” or “Next” button again?
Such ambiguous generic error messaging is designed to make things easier for the developers, but its a bad content strategy, poor UX design, and makes for a confusing customer experience.
Or is it just me?
Alan
A Note of Appreciation
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Books on the Shelf
While I was at my local writers group meeting last weekend one book kept coming up in the conversation. And that book just happens to sit on my content strategy bookcase too.
William Goldman’s excellent Adventures in the Screentrade may seem to be an strange fit when it comes to thinking about business related content - after all we aren’t writing movie scripts, which is what the book is primarily about.
But what it did teach me is about the effective structure of storytelling - and all good business communications is about storytelling - as well as how to find the “spine of the story” and develop your message succinctly and powerfully.
When your customer or prospect lands on your webpage, reads a white paper, or engages with one of your social media posts, they see themselves as the hero of their own journey, and it’s our job to support them in that journey. And there’s no better place to learn about the hero’s journey that from one of Hollywood’s most accomplished screenwriters.
Talking About Storytelling
Recent Events
Just a reminder you can find my recent conversation with Larry Swanson on the Content Strategy Insights podcast about the power of storytelling at https://ellessmedia.com/csi/alan-porter/
Or you can catch the video version below.
If you missed it you can still access my webinar on Customer Focused Storytelling that was hosted by The Content Wrangler
Upcoming Events
On March 15th I’m scheduled to speak at the Boston DITA User Group meeting.
I’m looking forward to presenting “Is DITA Just a Story” at the ConVex conference in San Jose in April, 2025.
And in June I’ll be making a return to the CX Behind The Scenes podcast to discuss the AI Hype Cycle.
Weekly Thought
The fully engaged customer journey cannot be addressed by separate applications at different parts of the process. To be fully effective, it has to provide an exceptional continuous experience made up of a combination of many different experiences, processes, and systems that all have to interact.
Customer Focused Storytelling Workshops
We are now taking bookings for our popular Customer Focused Storytelling Workshops for Q1/2025, and we wanted to make sure that as a newsletter reader you got an early opportunity to lock-in a date.
“Weaving storytelling into the mix makes the content more compelling, accessible, and effective!”
Learn how to deliver content-driven experiences that your customers relate to on our two-day Customer Outcome Focused Storytelling workshop.
In this workshop, we will:
Examine content from the customer’s perspective.
Plan how to adapt content delivery to meet the needs of a rapidly changing marketplace
Examine why every business transaction is a story
Outline the 10 Rules of Storytelling as applied to Customer Experience
Apply proven storytelling techniques to your content.
Identify potential opportunities for incorporating storytelling techniques
into the production of your customer-facing content assets.Facilitate an interactive feedback session on your existing customer-facing content.
If you would like more details, or you like to discuss reserving a date for yourself and your team to benefit from a Customer Focused Storytelling Workshop, just email us at ajp@4jsgroup.com to reserve your date.
In The Bookstore
If you enjoy the contents of this newsletter and would like more, we have three books always available from XML Press.
You can also check out The Content Pool website or follow us on FaceBook . - You can also find Alan on most of the social media platforms @alanjporter.
Please feel free to share the newsletter and pass it around to any friends or colleagues you think might find it of value.
Till next time - have fun paddling in The Content Pool.
Alan J. Porter
The Content Pool™ is a division of the 4Js Group LLC