#Error37 is trending as a top term on twitter right now. What is that? It’s the error code for the recently released Diablo III game from Blizzard. And it’s a total UX fail. Twelve years in the making, they say, and yet they didn’t implement a waiting queue? It’s 2012 and the best they could do on their launch night was a popup dialog box with an error code? Really? Literally, millions of people stared at that dialog box over and over before just turning in to bed. I actually got past the dreaded Error 37 only to find out that there’s just another line of errors behind it. Error 3007, Error 3005, and Error 300008, for instance. In their defense, I will say that I’ve never been able to type in and be rejected by an authentication system as fast as in Diablo III. Because just like better failure experiences, performance is a key component of the user experience of software. In this case, it gives all new meaning to the phrase “fail faster”.
That said, you just can’t buy the kind of free publicity that Blizzard will get out of this. Well, you could but it’d be expensive. And before long, people will just remember that the game was really popular and there were long lines.
But maybe Blizzard is feeling enough heat at the present moment that they’ll implement a better ux than just an error popup dialog next time. And hopefully it’s a good lesson to all of us in the industry that predicting common failures/errors and handling them gracefully is part of what makes great experiences for customers.