Make errors fun

Errors suck.

• Spending a lot of effort on writing a spreadsheet function, only to see #n/a
• An unexpected error occurred. Okay? Thanks for the information?
• Or the worst one of all: wrong credentials.

Errors are helpful. They inform you about something not working properly. Hopefully they tell you what went wrong. And sometimes they even tell you how to fix the issue.

But still, errors are not fun.

Let’s change that!

Humour makes the world turn. It lightens the mood. It makes something bad, a bit less bad.

The best recent example that I have seen is the 404 error of the Dutch Volt Zeeland chapter.

This is such a clever solution. The header translates to “this page has gone under”. This is ironic, because water management is a very important topic for the province of Zeeland. Without water management … well… Read the next section for more on this.

Back to the main point: this Volt Chapter made a fun error page for when you try to open a non-existing link!

I hope you’ll agree I’ve done the same. And that I might be your best recent example: my 404 page

The dangers of water in the Dutch Zeeland province

A quick heads-up: while writing about the Volt Zeeland 404 page, I fell into a little rabbit hole. It didn’t fit the previous section, so I made a whole new section just for water management in Zeeland. This is very much off-funny-errors-topic.

There are plenty of videos and (moving gif) images out there showing the difference between the Netherlands before and after our modern water management systems. Take this 11-year-old Reddit post. This Zeeland Veilig page about floods is also insightful. There is almost no safe spot in the entire province during the worst-case scenario.

There is a lot of information to be found on this, but that’s obviously mostly in Dutch. If you’re interested in learning more, I’d recommend searching for a few videos on YouTube. You can use these search terms to get started: 1953 flood, the Delta Works, and land reclamation in the Netherlands.

I’m starting to doubt whether I can describe the error page as ironically funny.

Final notes

Errors will never be truly fun. But a well-placed joke turns a moment of frustration into a moment of… well, less frustration. So the next time you write an error message: Tell people what went wrong, tell them how to fix it, and if you can, try to add a little smile on their faces. Your users will thank you. Or at least sigh more softly.