An example today about how an error message can make the difference between a happy end user, and an annoyed end user that is willing to blog about it – that’s me.
If you try to login to your account on the Fido.ca website, at about 11:30PM Pacific Time, you will get this error message: “Sorry! Your request cannot be completed at this time. Please try again later.”
On any other website, I would assume that there is a temporary, generally one-time, issue. Maybe the site is overloaded, or it might have a technical glitch. That’s OK. In Fido land? This error means that the website is down for it’s nightly maintenance and I should give up and try tomorrow, but earlier in the night because Fido doesn’t like people on the West Coast.
This isn’t listed anywhere – it’s something that I’ve deduced over months of using the Fido site to pay my bill by credit card. I’m not impressed that Fido’s website has a nightly maintenance schedule, especially one that seems to kick in before midnight Vancouver time, but I’m really not impressed by the wording of the error. All they need to do is follow the banks and fess up to their maintenance schedule. Something like, “Hi, the Fido.ca user site is unavailable from 11PM to 6AM PST. Please try again during our operating hours.”
As an aside, if you’re wondering what the error message is if you have entered your phone number or password wrong, it’s “No match for that phone number and password was found. Please try again… Sorry! No match was found for that phone number and password. Please retry.” in a red box right above the login boxes. I kept getting the “Please try again later” error, so at one time I wondered if I had been using the wrong password.
Is this a big enough annoyance to make me switch my cell plan away from Fido? No, but this added to various other annoyances and… well… I’ll certainly be evaluating my options when the new wireless providers in Canada start up in 2010.