Invalid State Error: What’s a Poor Person to Do?
October 7th, 2008
So, the user had just booked their ticket and was choosing their seat assignments when, out of no where, comes this error message:
What should the user do with this little tidbit of information?
An “Invalid State Error” sounds like someone entered the wrong US state abbreviation, but the system a minute ago confirmed the reservation. Someone who doesn’t understand how a digital state machine (like a web server) works probably won’t recognize that error message.
The conditions for the problem are also not very informative, since they are all wrong. In this instance, the user had been interacting with the system without any breaks that took more than a minute, there were no multiple browser windows open, the back button hadn’t been used, and there was no use of bookmarked pages. Not one of these conditions is actually true.
And what does “Please start over.” mean? Is the reservation lost? (Turns out: no.) Were the seat assignment changes lost? (Turns out: no.)
There is no button to start over. Our user wondered if they needed to make a second reservation (that would’ve been a disaster). Fortunately, they were a savvy enough traveler to check out the “Existing Reservations” link hidden deep in AA.com’s menus and found the reservation was there, intact, and all set.
This user didn’t leave the site with a lot of confidence in American Airlines or the site.
How many messages like this does your site have embedded deep in their code? What happens when a user hits one? What kind of experience do they have?
October 7th, 2008 at 5:02 pm
Hi, Jared. Great article! I’m amazed how often I come across these types of issues. Here’s one from shopouraisles.com. They were gleeful to inform me, I was using an “incorrect web browser” (Safari).
http://www.usablewebb.com/images/incorrect-web-browser.png
October 8th, 2008 at 5:23 pm
There is no such thing as “Incorrect use of browser’s Back button”, just badly designed web apps.
It may as well have said “User error. You probably messed up in some way.”
October 10th, 2008 at 5:28 am
I’ve had this exact thing happen to me once on the Eurostar website. I was told to start over, so I did. I ended up buying two tickets. After talking with them on the phone, they assured me I would only be charged for one ticket (I wasn’t) and there would be no problem traveling. Well, they canceled both tickets and charged me for both!
This entire scenario was caused by my “incorrect use” of the back button. I’m finding out that it’s a good policy to never use the back button when trying to buy something online.
October 13th, 2008 at 6:30 am
You’ll find this interesting.
The other day I was withdrawing money from an ATM when I noticed a leaflet stuck on the door which basically explained all the error codes that one could receive while interacting with the ATM.
Better than nothing at all though it could have been located on the wall behind the ATM to increase effectiveness, but was rather amusing none the less.
October 13th, 2008 at 10:49 pm
Preventable errors topped with horrible error message writing. Pretty pitiful. My favorite is the one about having multiple browser windows open. Does that mean I can’t have my gmail in another window? Likely they are talking about instances of their own site, but they fail to communicate this with their users.
Other websites let you have multiple instances. Not efficient workflow, but possible.
October 20th, 2008 at 6:40 pm
Garret, nice comment. I checked out that site and interstingly, their home page welcomes you with a list of supported browsers on the right-hand-side. It’s like an exclusive country club for browsers
a kind-of virtual xenophobia and very 1996-like. thanks for pointing it out
November 18th, 2008 at 8:38 am
In a similar vein:
http://www.bengilman.com/2008/09/a-question-of-properness/
For me it’s exactly the sort of thing that would be turned up in a first round of sense-checking an application. In the American Airlines example at least it’s a result of a technical error. In my experience these situations are as regularly present in working applications as they are in broken ones.