Giving user feedback on errors
Every application will suffer failures at some point, either through internal faults or failures of third parties on which it relies. The measure of a great application is failing rarely, recovering quickly, and providing feedback while the problem persists. During error conditions, letting the users know what’s going on is the difference between a good user experience and a support case.
Real-world example – Deliberately stopping the video
On one video application I worked on, we implemented protection against packet loss on video streams. One important tactic was to reduce the bit rate – if the available bandwidth had dropped, we needed to fit our video stream to the available speed. That meant reducing the quality of the video, and sometimes even stopping the video entirely so that the audio could get through and users could still talk to each other.
Unfortunately, we didn’t give the user any indication of what...
