Ship’s Biscuit — Flipping the digital landscape to portrait.

I was excited to be invited to try out Google’s new Ad Planner (more of this later) application today. I’ve used it a couple of times now and have suggested improvements and features. But that’s not important right now…

What is important is Google’s lack of interest in their 404 page.

10 years ago that little “Did you mean: ” was truly inspired. There was a time when I though “Wow! Google thinks of everything”. And that’s what great design should make you think and feel. At first you get that little warm glow when it seems to understand you despite the fact that you did something stupid and then after that you forget about it because it just fits in with your life. It doesn’t stop you on your journey, slap you round the face and then ignore you for getting something wrong. That kind of thing isn’t fun.

So I was pretty surprised to see this when I missed an ‘n’ off the word ‘adplanner’ in the the URL ‘www.google.com/adplanner’. Check this out:

This is a 404 page which, I guess is one of the most well-known error codes, given that we’ve all seen a couple in our time. Developers and designers often ignore them because they mostly feel that people should either get that kind of thing right first time or it happens so infrequently that it doesn’t matter. I was pretty appalled by this particular page. Of course it isn’t a critical user journey for Google but, being Google I guess 20 billion people see this every 10 seconds.

First, I though this was just because the Ad Planner application is in Beta. Turns out all of the applications lead to the same unhelpful 404 message. Take a look.

Okay, of course it’s not Google’s fault that I think slower than I type but there is an opportunity for Google to make me think “Wow! Google are wonderful, they think of everything”. It’s about forgiveness. To me, their 404 looks like this:

When surely, me and millions of other fingerly challenged people should be seeing something like this:

I know this is picky as hell but, take the Fail Whale as an example. Fail Whale is a lovely little picture that you see when Twitter is working too hard to process what you requested. People love that little guy and his birdies, there’s even official merchandise and a fan blog.

Never mind who failed, either way, it’s kind of insulting when a system tells you that you did something wrong and it’s not very friendly to simply say ‘An ERROR HAS OCCURRED’ - why so aggressive? When a system brushes over your inadequacies and attempts to guess what you’re after, you simply can’t help but love it. Despite lots of people being mighty upset with Twitter’s downtime, I can’t help think that The Fail Whale is responsible for saving Twitter’s ass despite the competition.

So, in conclusion, let’s just stop being so negative and think about The Fail Whale next time we’re thinking what to do with users who get things wrong.

Following on from my Viral Patterns post, here’s a new one that I’m putting into the Weird Science pattern, although, at a push, if might fit into Animal Personification too. I don’t know which agency is responsible but the creative execution is so much like this GamesBreakOut one that I would bet a packet of Pickled Onion Monster Munch that it was ViralFactory.

Another thing I’ve noticed here which is very clever is that they have called it something which (at the start of the campaign) gives 0 results on Google i.e. ‘Berfishocca’. Pretty smart, think they could have got some better actors though.

(En français)

There are exactly one hundred million billion new viral marketing campaigns seeded every 10 minutes - the vast majority are completely dire and destined to fail. So what separates success from failure? Well, the best appear to exhibit similar patterns and by using these patterns in your own campaigns you could be on your way to a free buffet and a drunken snog at next Summer’s Revolution Awards.

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