Comment by serf
3 days ago
I don't care that they use anime catgirls.
What I do care about is being met with something cutesy in the face of a technical failure anywhere on the net.
I hate Amazon's failure pets, I hate google's failure mini-games -- it strikes me as an organizational effort to get really good at failing rather than spending that same effort to avoid failures all together.
It's like everyone collectively thought the standard old Apache 404 not found page was too feature-rich and that customers couldn't handle a 3 digit error, so instead we now get a "Whoops! There appears to be an error! :) :eggplant: :heart: :heart: <pet image.png>" and no one knows what the hell is going on even though the user just misplaced a number in the URL.
This is something I've always felt about design in general. You should never make it so that a symbol for an inconvenience appears happy or smug, it's a great way to turn people off your product or webpage.
Reddit implemented something a while back that says "You've been blocked by network security!" with a big smiling Reddit snoo front and centre on the page and every time I bump into it I can't help but think this.
The original versions were a way to make fun even a boring event such as a 404. If the page stops conveying the type of error to the user then it's just bad UX but also vomiting all the internal jargon to a non-tech user is bad UX.
So, I don't see an error code + something fun to be that bad.
People love dreaming of the 90s wild web and hate the clean cut soulless corp web of today, so I don't see how having fun error pages to be such an issue?
This assumes it's fun.
Usually when I hit an error page, and especially if I hit repeated errors, I'm not in the mood for fun, and I'm definitely not in the mood for "fun" provided by the people who probably screwed up to begin with. It comes off as "oops, we can't do anything useful, but maybe if we try to act cute you'll forget that".
Also, it was more fun the first time or two. There's a not a lot of orginal fun on the error pages you get nowadays.
> People love dreaming of the 90s wild web and hate the clean cut soulless corp web of today
It's been a while, but I don't remember much gratuitous cutesiness on the 90s Web. Not unless you were actively looking for it.
> This assumes it's fun.
Not to those who don't exist in such cultures. It's creepy, childish, strange to them. It's not something they see in everyday life, nor would I really want to. There is a reason why cartoons are aimed for younger audiences.
Besides if your webserver is throwing errors, you've configured it incorrectly. Those pages should be branded as the site design with a neat and polite description to what the error is.
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3 replies →
> What I do care about is being met with something cutesy in the face of a technical failure anywhere on the net
This is probably intentional. They offer an paid unbranded version. If they had a corporate friendly brand on the free offering, then there would be fewer people paying for the unbranded one.
Guru Meditations and Sad Macs are not your thing?
FWIW second and third iteration of AmigaOS didn't have "Guru Meditation"; instead it bluntly labeled the numbers as error and task.
That also got old when you got it again and again while you were trying to actually do something. But there wasn't the space to fit quite as much twee on the screen...
I hear this