I recently spoke with a user who was having problems with one of my web sites. He claimed to be getting an error message that said, “it doesn’t work”. Of course, Apache and IIS do not return messages like that and there is no custom message on my sites that say this, but it got me thinking.
This would actually be an interesting universal error message for web sites and apps. It doesn’t help the developer narrow down the problem, but its straight to the point that a feature failed. Fortunately, no developer would use an error message like this since it makes our lives more difficult in identifying a problem and replicating it.
An important thing to keep in mind here is that when a user claims to get an error that’s impossible, we need to remain polite when speaking to them. Keep customers happy by solving their problems and don’t make them feel like fools when they make mistakes, don’t use features correctly, or find bugs. Our customers pay our bills, so be nice to them. 🙂
