Flashes of Panic

I have a gift certificate to the swimming mail-order place where I get my suits. I couldn’t figure out how to use it on a web order, so tonight I called them and discovered I can’t use it over the phone, either; only with a postal order.

In web design, we use the term “degrading gracefully.” I like it a lot. It means that you accept that not everyone will see your site in all the glory you intended, but you arrange for fall-back positions. You may not look as good in IE5/Mac as you do in Firefox, but it’s not obvious what has broken. And if someone arrives at your site using Lynx, they can still read your page, and it makes sense. And they aren’t made to feel like they’re missing out. (For example, there’s a built in mechanism for frame-based sites to show something to browsers which don’t support frames, but usually developers just put in something ugly, like, “You should consider upgrading to a better browser.” That’s ungraceful degradation.)

In a wider context, degrading gracefully is about being aware of where your system might fail, and being ready for the failure. It means not showing error messages to the user, unless they also explain how to avoid the error—and it’s even better to fix the error transparently, so the user doesn’t know what’s happening. From a customer-service standpoint, this is really the only way to approach things: you give the customer the most convenient option, then the next most convenient, then the next most convenient. You don’t offer them a “convenience or stone age” decision.

My experience with the swim store made me think: there are probably still some people out there who think, despite all the levels and layers of encryption, that it’s not safe to order on the internet. And some of those people may not have our printed catalog. They might find our titles online and want to order. Where’s the fall-back?

I wonder if it might not be a very user-friendly and graceful degradation to offer an order-form bail-out option. It would present a printable page which includes all the information the customer had already filled in (shipping address, items and quantities, etc.) with only the payment information to be manually filled out by the customer. They could fill in the payment details and send it off, about fifteen steps easier and faster than the degradation the swim store offered (I had to request that they send me another catalog.)

At the very least, there should be a PDF of an order form for the hard-copy Luddite.

That’s degrading gracefully. Online order to form-driven printout to PDF order form, and only then if that fails do you have to request a catalog.

Actually, they should have accounted for gift certificates when they first set up the website ordering. That would be really handling things well.