Kill the Excessively Ghoulish

“There has been a death in the family.”
     What a cruel message to flash onto a consumer’s computer screen unexpectedly, especially when nobody in that consumer’s family really died. Even on a Halloween day like today, scaring somebody this way is excessively ghoulish.
     To help me explain the lesson in all this for retailers, go back fifty long years:
     During much of the 1960s, Burroughs Corporation computers were among the best selling in the world, with sales revenues second only to IBM’s. Burroughs produced large computer systems—mainframes—that incorporated creative innovations designed by astoundingly clever experts. Well, astoundingly clever when it came to creative computer innovations. When it came to insights about users of the systems, they were not as smart.
     Oh, they tried to be clever. A team working on one of the Burroughs Computers configurations, for example, decided that they had to catch the attention of any user who committed an error which resulted in the system needing to be completely restarted. In the process of restarting, data would almost inevitably be lost.
     The designers of the interface could have decided to give the user a message like, “System must be restarted. Any pending data will be lost.” Better yet would have been an error message explaining what the person might have done to cause the problem and pointing the user toward a respectful, friendly tutorial about how to avoid making the error in the future.
     But all of this occurred at a time when attention to usability was in its early stages. And I guess to the Burroughs Computers employees’ technical minds, it seemed so much more clever than other error messages to flash onto the screen “There has been a death in the family.”
     I came across this example when doing research for my 1984 book Computer Confidence: A Human Approach to Computers. Much of what I wrote then is now completely out-of-date. Current computer systems seem to have more wizards than existed in all of medieval Europe. But in every business, people with technical knowledge still too often forget that smart consumers make mistakes.
     The lesson for retailers: Regularly check that you and your staff treasure customer misunderstandings as opportunities to learn how to communicate better. Insensitivity to customers can be a fatal error. Oh, yes, the message “Fatal error” is another ghoulish remnant of the earlier days of computing.

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