I’ve been slammed being critical of designs for my day job, but today’s encounter with Logitech’s software was so awkward I had to post. Some might just consider this a flat-out bug instead of a design issue. Still, mechanisms like this need to account for fail cases.
For quite some time I’ve been dealing with buggy Logitech Unifying Software. Today, again, I checked for updates. The app showed it was up-to-date. But how could this be? It’s been a year+ since the last time it updated. Did they abandon it? Let’s walk through it.
First, I check for updates
Simple, right? It fires off this screen. It spins for a minute, then shows this
At this point you would think it the software has checked for updates and it discovered the latest version is installed. Right? Well, like me, you’d be wrong.
I checked the Logitech website and
My installed version is 1.1-301 and the latest version – about five months old – is 1.2.315
Tip #1:Â Design for the fail case. You don’t know all of them, sure. But in a case like this, at least know when you’re able to get the correct version number back and when you can’t. And when you can’t, let the user know.
Tip #2:Â Make the experience thoughtful. Don’t just say “page not served” or “due to heavy load the page is broken” – especially when that’s not the case.
Here’s a few good examples of designing for the fail case.
Slack
And plenty of other people have gone digging to show awesome 404 page collections:
30 brilliantly designed 404 error pages
The art of error: 12 best examples of cool and creative 404 pages