Leverage Your Error Reports

When Google Chrome can’t reach a website, and has received the same outcome from multiple Chrome users, it reports that you’re not the only one struggling with the website. This is helpful, because as a user you learn that the problem is probably not on your end.

What to do with out-of-scope errors?

I could have called this post “1 + 1 = 3”, but this is probably a bit clearer. Anyway, the point is that when you have a large data set of error reports (and Google Chrome definitely falls in this category) you should take advantage of that. As I wrote recently you need to keep track of all error reports. If you get a lot of them (and fixing the error is out of your hands, as in Chrome’s example) you can leverage this data in a way that still benefits your users. Simply by explaining that other users are also struggling with this.

Even if you can’t fix the error you can help your users. Perhaps this should be rule #4?